Historic Monroe Station on Tamiami Trail in Big Cypress burns

• Before it burned, Monroe Station was one of two of the original six such outposts on Tamiami Trail
• 1920s-era oases offered gas, food, security patrol to remote areas
• Plans were in the works to restore the historic building to its early appearance

Fire has destroyed Monroe Station, a historic Tamiami Trail outpost in the Big Cypress. The cause is being investigated, said Bob DeGross, spokesman for the Big Cypress National Preserve, which was in the early stages of planning the long-abandoned wooden building's restoration.

"My understanding is it started around 11 p.m. (Saturday)," DeGross said "I don't have many details other than that."

Fort Myers historian and real estate appraiser Woody Hanson is the grandson of W. Stanley Hanson, one of the Tamiami Trailblazers, a group that made the first Florida coast-to-coast trek on the road in 1928, ushering in the era of cross-Everglades travel.

Mourning the iconic building's loss, Hanson said, "Florida, along with her folklore and legacy assets continue to slip away (as) an outpost on a former Florida frontier vanishes, along with the Florida myth."

Historic monument to fall, rise again

Before it burned, Monroe Station was one of two of the original six such outposts on Tamiami Trail, situated on the western end of scenic Loop Road.

The other, Royal Palm Hammock station, is still a gas station selling live shrimp, sweet tea and firewood just outside Collier-Seminole State Park.

Originally constructed in the 1920s, the remote oases, staffed by lawmen and their wives, offered gas, food and security to motorists traversing the two-lane Everglades highway.

They were also sales centers, in which the motorcycle-mounted staff was expected to urge travelers to buy some land along with their sandwiches and gas. After all, there was plenty of it — most owned by Barron Gift Collier.

"This was the most remote place in the eastern United States," DeGross told The News-Press in 2013. "In a 100-mile stretch, there wasn't one house."

The short-but-colorful heyday of the six way stations on the trail bore Collier's trademark showmanship.

The millionaire advertising tycoon had already masterminded the publicity stunt that got the trail finished in the first-place: the trek of the Tamiami Trailblazers in 1928, drawing media attention from around the country.

Five years earlier, Collier had agreed to bankroll the project in return for the state Legislature carving off 2,300 square miles from Lee County to form Collier County in his honor.

Once the roadway was opened, Collier built identical two-story, Italian-style buildings at 10- to 12-mile intervals. He hired couples to live on the buildings' second floors. While the wives pumped gas, sold groceries and kept the public restrooms clean, the husbands patrolled on their Harleys in uniforms Collier bought from a shuttered Broadway musical,

"They went out during the day and once at night," said Naomi Goren, curator of education at the Collier County Museum in Naples.

"They were essentially a private police force created by Collier," DeGross said, "but they are considered to be the first Collier County law enforcement, and also the first two deputies killed in the line of duty."

One was hit by a car soon after the stations opened; the other wrecked his motorcycle in morning fog, DeGross says.

"Some of them did have families too, and I remember reading a little memoir written by the daughter of one of them," he says. "She remembered that the summers were so slow that the families would just screen in the awning roof that covered the gas pumps and use it as a lanai."

But as the Great Depression deepened, business got slow year-round and by 1934, Collier had disbanded his security force and sold the stations, according to a document in the Collier Museum's archive. One was moved to Everglades City and converted into a house, DeGross said, and he assumes all but two of the buildings were demolished. Of the pair that remained, one is still a gas station/bait shop at Royal Palm Hammock.

The other, Monroe Station, remained a boarded-up ruin on park service land.

It was still a honky-tonk roadhouse as late as the 1980s, and photographer Niki Butcher, who'd moved to the Big Cypress with her husband, Clyde, also a photographer, found it fascinating, if intimidating. "It looked like a wild place (and) Clyde and I don't do bars or wild places," she recalled. She eventually snapped a photo of it, which she turned into a popular hand-colored print.

Gladesmen leave lasting impression

In recent years, though, the building was a bleached hulk, awaiting restoration.

Even though it was on the National Register of Historic Places, funding hadn't been easy to find. "We got some money — about $300,000 — from a federal highway grant," DeGross said, estimating at least that much more was needed to do the job right. "We want to stabilize and restore it, but it's in great disrepair and about the only remaining original (portion) that can be reused is the roof."

Even so, he had hoped it would happen, given the building's historic value. "This road, and the stations connected with it, brought great change and opened up the state. The Tamiami Trail changed Florida forever," DeGross said. "It is a terrible loss."