On December 6, 1947, President Harry S Truman stood at Everglades City and dedicated a national park unlike any the country had made before. It had taken nineteen years since a landscape architect first put the idea in writing — and thirteen years since Congress said yes.
A small beginning: Royal Palm, 1916
The first protected ground in the Everglades was modest: Royal Palm State Park, created by Florida in 1916 on about 4,000 acres. In 1923 National Park Service Director Stephen T. Mather recommended that an “untouched example of the Everglades” be set aside as a national park. The idea still needed a champion.
Enter Ernest Coe
Ernest F. Coe, a Yale-trained landscape architect, moved to Miami in 1925. What he saw in the Glades — rare birds shot, orchids stripped from the trees — convinced him the place would not survive without federal protection. In 1928 he wrote to Mather proposing a national park and organized the Tropical Everglades National Park Association to push for one. Florida’s legislature created a park commission in 1929, and Congress authorized a study of the idea the same year.
Authorized — but not yet real
Congress authorized Everglades National Park on May 30, 1934, for an area of 2,164,480 acres. But authorization was only a promise. The land still had to be acquired, and the boundaries argued over, for more than a decade. Congress authorized a national wildlife refuge in 1944; in 1946 Florida appropriated $2 million to buy land.
1947
The pieces came together in 1947. That year Marjory Stoneman Douglas — who had joined a 1930 congressional inspection of the proposed park — published The Everglades: River of Grass. And on December 6, Truman formally dedicated the park.
Ernest Coe’s many years of effective and unselfish efforts to save the Everglades earned him a place among the immortals.
Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman, on Coe’s death in 1951, as recorded by the National Park Service
What came after
Coe died on January 1, 1951. On December 6, 1996 — the park’s 49th anniversary — its main visitor center was christened in his name. Today the National Park Service says the park covers 1.5 million acres of South Florida, and UNESCO has listed it as a World Heritage Site since 1979.