How Everglades National Park Came to Be

By Everglades Godfather · October 11, 2026 · 5 min read

Everglades National Park was authorized by Congress in 1934 and formally dedicated by President Harry S. Truman on December 6, 1947, at a ceremony in Everglades City. It was a new kind of national park. Most earlier parks protected dramatic scenery such as canyons, geysers and mountains. Everglades is described by the National Park Service as the first national park created for its biodiversity: its wildlife, plants and the slow-moving water that supports them. Getting there took decades of persistence.

Early protection and a growing idea

The first protected piece of the Everglades came in 1916, when Royal Palm State Park was created on Paradise Key, a hammock of tall royal palms south of Homestead. The Florida Federation of Women's Clubs played a central role in saving it, and that roughly 4,000-acre tract later became part of the core of the national park.

By the early 1920s, the idea of a national park in South Florida was already in the air. In 1923, Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, suggested that an undisturbed example of the Everglades deserved national park status. But turning a suggestion into a park required a champion.

Ernest F. Coe's campaign

That champion was Ernest F. Coe, a Yale-trained landscape architect from Connecticut who moved to Miami with his wife, Anna, in 1925. He explored the region extensively and made the park his life's work.

In 1928 Coe helped organize the Tropical Everglades Park Association, with the well-known botanist David Fairchild as its first president and Coe as executive secretary. The next year, the Florida Legislature created the Tropical Everglades National Park Commission to carry the effort forward, and Coe became its executive chairman.

Coe was famously uncompromising. He pushed for a large park that took in not only the southern glades but also wide stretches of surrounding land and water, believing a smaller park could not protect the system. He wrote letters, led tours and lobbied lawmakers year after year, and he argued that the park needed its outer lands and waters to secure its water supply. He is often remembered as the father of the park, and today the main visitor center near Homestead bears his name: the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, christened in 1996.

From authorization to dedication

In May 1934, Congress passed an act authorizing Everglades National Park. There was a catch: the federal government would not buy the land. It had to be acquired and donated, and the Great Depression, followed by World War II, slowed everything down.

The breakthrough came after the war. In 1946, the Florida Legislature set aside $2 million to purchase private lands within the proposed park, and the Federation of Women's Clubs donated Royal Palm State Park. On December 6, 1947, President Truman dedicated the park. The final boundaries were smaller than Coe had wanted. He had fought, without success, to include upper Key Largo, the coral reef and part of the Big Cypress, and he took little satisfaction in the result. Over the following decades, many of those areas were protected after all, through park expansions, Biscayne National Park, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and Big Cypress National Preserve.

The same year, Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass. Her book helped the public see the Everglades not as a worthless swamp but as a slow, wide river flowing south through sawgrass.

An internationally recognized park

Everglades National Park has since earned three major international designations, a rare combination:

• International Biosphere Reserve (1976), designated by UNESCO under its Man and the Biosphere program, jointly with Dry Tortugas National Park.
• World Heritage Site (1979), recognized by UNESCO under the World Heritage Convention.
• Wetland of International Importance (1987), under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

Most of the park is also protected as federal wilderness. Congress designated about 1.3 million acres as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness, and wilderness and potential wilderness together cover roughly 86 percent of the park.

How big is the park?

Today the park covers about 1.5 million acres, a little over 2,400 square miles of land and water, spread across Miami-Dade, Monroe and Collier counties. It grew over time: in 1989, Congress added roughly 109,500 acres in the East Everglades. That makes it one of the largest national parks in the lower 48 states, and the park is also a major source of drinking water for South Florida residents.

What makes it different is its position where temperate North America meets the tropics. The park protects freshwater sawgrass marsh, pinelands, hardwood hammocks, cypress, mangrove forests and the shallow waters of Florida Bay. It is home to more than 300 kinds of birds and dozens of threatened or endangered animal species, and it is famous as a place where both American alligators and American crocodiles live. Human history here reaches back more than 2,000 years.

The Everglades is bigger than the park

One point surprises many visitors: the national park is only part of the Everglades. Historically, the Everglades system began far to the north, with the Kissimmee River feeding Lake Okeechobee, and water then spreading south across a vast marsh to Florida Bay. Much of that original wetland has been drained for farms and cities, and what remains includes state water conservation areas, Big Cypress National Preserve, tribal lands of the Miccosukee and Seminole people, and other public and private land.

Much of the land along the Tamiami Trail west of Miami lies outside the park boundary but is still part of the same flowing system. Because the park sits at the downstream end, what happens upstream, in terms of how much water flows and how clean it is, decides much of its fate. Coe understood that the Everglades had to be protected as a connected whole, and that idea now drives modern restoration.