Six thousand years of eating from the water
Collier County's tourism bureau describes Marco as the biggest island in the mangrove maze that runs south from here toward the Everglades. People have lived off these waters for a very long time. The Marco Island Historical Society's museum traces settlement back about 5,000 years on nearby Horr's Island, then to the Muspa and the Calusa, who dominated Florida's southwest coast for centuries and carved tools and ceremonial objects from wood and shell.
The best known image from that past is the Key Marco Cat. The museum shows a bronze casting of it made around 1896 to 1900 by the sculptor Samuel Murray, along with shell pendants from Caxambas, Key Marco and Goodland.
From about 1870 to 1960 the island had two pioneer villages, Marco and Caxambas, and the society says their economies centered on farming, fishing and clamming. Daily life survives in the diary of 14 year old Saloma Olds, written in 1914 and 1915, and in the scale used to weigh a 100 pound tarpon that islander Charles Louis Olds caught on May 20, 1915.
The resort island came later. In the 1960s and 1970s the Mackles, founders of the Deltona Corporation, reshaped Marco into a planned community of canals, golf and vacation homes, and the old fishing life moved to the edges.
Goodland and the claw
The edge where fishing held on is Goodland. The county tourism bureau says family owned fisheries still line the waterfront there and in Everglades City, and it points stone crab buyers to Kirk Fish Company on Buzzard's Bay, which packs claws on ice to take home along with Gulf shrimp and fresh fish, and to the Little Bar, which serves locally sourced claws in an Old Florida room. On the main island, Pincher's serves claws from local fisheries.
According to the bureau, the commercial claw trade was born in this corner of the county. The claws are cooked as soon as they come off the boat, so they reach the counter ready to eat. Most people have them cold with lime or mustard sauce, but a few minutes of steam and a dish of butter make a fine winter supper too.
