Iconic Rod & Gun Club

Once known as a hideaway for U.S. presidents, today the venerable Rod & Gun Club in Everglades City is a living, breathing historic structure, perhaps the most iconic in Collier County. Tiny Everglades City, the original county seat of Collier County, has several structures that are among Collier’s most iconic - Bank of Everglades, the Old Collier County Courthouse, and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Depot come immediately to mind. As we recognize Collier County’s centennial, the Rod & Gun Club, opened by county namesake Barron Collier in 1925, can still be enjoyed in much the same manner that at least five U.S. presidents and scores of celebrities have done over the decades.

In 1960, Florida history writer Hampton Dunn (1916-2002) dubbed the Rod & Gun Club a hideaway for presidents in his Phototouring Florida column. “A landmark here,” Dunns writes, “still standing and as beautiful as ever, is the posh Rod and Gun Club. This massive frame structure, overlooking the waterfront, has been the pleasant hideaway for at least five American Presidents, as well as numerous other celebrities. President Eisenhower and his wife Mamie fished here while he was still a top general in the U.S. Army. President Harry Truman stayed here when he came here in 1947 to dedicate the Everglades National Park, whose western gateway is nearby.”

Other U.S. presidents who were guests there were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon.

Current owner Patty Bowen only recalls one president staying at the Rod & Gun Club in her 50-plus years there. Her father, Martin Bowen, purchased the Rod & Gun Club in 1972. 

"The only one that I saw personally was Nixon,” Bowen said. "I just met his entourage, a big entourage. He had fallen. He was out with a charter fishing captain, and he fell off the boat accidentally. You know, it was just one of those things. Who knows why? I just think he was maybe casting or who knows what it was. I thought there was a picture of them getting him out of the water.”

The Rod & Gun Club was originally a residential home circa 1864. The lobby is filled with vintage taxidermy, including a Florida Panther, a bear, a turkey, and an otter. And there are lots of vintage fish mounts. The lobby area remains the heart of the Rod & Gun Club.

"The Rod & Gun Club is a hugely important historic structure in Collier County history,” said Thomas Lockyear III, Museum Manager of the Museum of the Everglades. "It could be argued that it’s where the concept of tourism in Southwest Florida began. Certainly, when Barron Collier purchased, expanded, and named it, the building provided the opportunity for him to put his advertising genius to work and promote the region to sportsmen and outdoor enthusiasts from around the world. But I think it’s important to note that the building - as the home of George Storter Jr. and his family - was already playing host to a variety of visitors long before Mr. Collier came to Florida. The Storter family was engaged in several agricultural enterprises and ran a general store on the Allen (later Barron) River but were soon engaged in the far more lucrative business of serving as hunting and fishing guides for wealthy visitors from the north. Storter was already expanding his home to accommodate the growing number of visitors in the early 1890s and was known for setting a lavish table that showcased the region’s unique variety of meats, fishes, fruits and vegetables. The Everglades hospitality that the Rod & Gun Club became famous for under its manager and head chef Snooky Senghaas didn’t begin in the Collier era. It started three decades before that with the Storters."

Bowen has met more celebrities over the years than she can remember.

“In my lifetime,” she said, "I couldn't tell you the people that I have seen. Burt Reynolds was here with Sally Fields. I'm sitting over there, that second table there, and I'm facing this way, and my sister is sitting with me, and she's telling me, she says, look at that lady in this huge hat. And the lady was like six feet tall. It was Jerry Hall. And who's walking behind her? Mick Jagger! I have come across so many people, I really have, in my time. A lot of times I don't even know who they were. But I think they like that. Sean Connery was here. Joe Pesci and Danny Glover. I liked Glover. Nice man. Very nice man.”

Pesci and Glover were there filming Gone Fishin’ in 1997. Bowen found their frontman to be quite a challenge.

"This is a true story,” Bowen starts out. "I'm sitting over there again, enjoying sitting by the pool table in the summertime. In came this guy, he was a young whippersnapper. He was younger than I was, and I was probably in my 30s. I don't know how old he was. And he's got a little pamphlet, and he says, ‘Hi, I think we might be interested in a movie here. I'm going to come back and we're going to have to look it over.’

"A month or two later, he came by and like 12 people come walking through. And I guess it was a director and all that stuff, and they were doing all this and that. He says, ‘We're going to take it.’ And he started telling me that they wanted this and that. I said, ‘Okay, that's fine.' So they're going to take it. 'And we're about two weeks out,’ he said. I said to him, ‘You know, I'm just a little town girl, not a big city girl.' They're from wherever, Hollywood or whatever. I said, 'You know what? Don't you think we should be kind of talking? How much is this going to cost?’ Because I’d been going through in my head for months now thinking what it should cost. And he says, ‘Yeah. Well, what do you think?' And I said, ‘Well, what are you thinking?' So he writes on a little piece of paper - maybe they do this in the big city - and he slides it across the table to me. And so I looked at it, and I said, ‘Well, you know - and I was being honest - I wasn't being clever or nothing, I said, ‘You know what? Let me just take that back and, you know, it's not going to work for us.' So I slid it back to him. I said, ‘We're not even close.' So I just walked away.”

He went home without a deal.

“The next week he goes, ‘Why didn't you call me? We can't back out now, we're too far into this.' And I said, ‘I'm going to tell you what I want.' He goes, ‘Really?' And this is a true story. He had to agree with it. So I'm signing the papers and they're going to be moving in the next day. I signed the papers and he says, ‘You're off the property for the next two months!' And he really kicked me off the property. He was that upset. But I wasn't being sly or anything. I was probably naive and I was just being very honest with him. It upset him extremely. Or maybe he got in a lot of trouble, I don't know, but he kicked me off. I had to drive around the property and I wasn't allowed in. Of course, I didn't like that. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I mean, I wasn't even allowed in the lunchroom. No, no, they kicked me off. They took control over the whole property with that contract. I was kicked right off my own property.”

Bowen didn’t divulge the financial terms of the contract, but it was lucrative.

"You know, I can't remember,” she said, "It was a lot. It was good. I'd like to have a whole bunch of those.”

The Collier County Historic and Archaeological Preservation Board includes nine Everglades City structures on their list of 47 historic sites in Collier County, including the Rod & Gun Club. Three of the structures are on the National Register of Historic Places. The Rod & Gun Club and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Depot perhaps should be on the National Register. Ironically, the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Depot structure may be facing demolition, though its owner, Bill Odrey, maintains that the building remains a viable structure. There’s a reason why the Rod & Gun Club isn't on the National Register. “We don’t want it to be,” Bowen said. 

"It’s historical,” agrees Patty Bowen, a second-generation owner of the Rod & Gun Club, "but daddy didn't want that. We could have got on the National Register of Historic Places. But then there's restrictions. I guess you can get grants and all kinds of stuff. But he said no, he didn't want that. He didn't want it because it comes with rules and regulations.”

Bowen considers herself an Everglades City girl. She’s also an Old Naples girl. For years, she lived three blocks off the beach in Old Naples, in a home her father, Martin Bowen, bought in the 1940s for $3,000. She sees the change that happened to the sleepy little beach town of Naples that she grew up in. She doesn’t want to be part of that happening in Everglades City, though she figures it is inevitable.

"I was raised in Naples on Ninth Avenue South and Third Street, right by the beach,” Bowen recalls. "I never wore shoes. There was nothing. All we did was go to the beach store or the movie theater on Third Street. We had bonfires on the beach, could sleep on the beach, and we'd ride our bicycles because the town kids, nobody had anything fancy. Naples was just a very tropical little town. And we did have the wealthy. We always had the wealthy. And they lived on the beach. It was Mrs. Bradley from Chicago, Briggs and Stratton. They all had swimming pools. They would let us come in on our bicycles into their yard and swim in their pool. That's how nice it was. I guess you'd call them old money now. They weren't flashy at all. They were just kind people with a lot of money, apparently, because they had a swimming pool."

Bowen hopes the Rod & Gun Club continues on, well into the future.

“People say to us,” Bowen said, "‘When do you want to sell?' You have to be a worker because this is not an easy thing. There's always maintenance, always something to do. And I don't know if the new generation wants that in their world. I'm not looking for someone to come in here and bulldoze it down and put in condos. You know, that's the new world, unfortunately. So I don't know. I'm no spring chicken anymore. We seem to just last until we don't last any longer. We hope for the next generation. I’m the only one left of the second generation. If something happens to me, my daughter and her two cousins will own it. So hopefully, they keep it and do the work here. One thing my father instilled is that you've got to work. Nothing's free in this world. So they have work ethic. We were taught work ethic."