Smallwood Store Celebrates 100 Years on Stilts

The Smallwood Store is still standing on its stilts in Chokoloskee after 100 years of weathering numerous storms. 

“Long live the Smallwood Store,” hailed Jen Hammer Cardenas, echoing other locals, after learning the Smallwood Store remained intact following Hurricane Ian in 2022. 

The decision to put the building on stilts in 1924 was a large part of what saved it, said owner Lynn Smallwood McMillin. 

Smallwood Store was a post office and trading post founded by her grandfather Ted Smallwood, first in his family’s home in 1906, serving the Miccosukee and Seminole Tribes as well as settlers and visitors long before becoming a museum and gift shop that McMillin now operates.

“It’s been on pilings for 100 years. My grandfather did that because he wanted to keep what he had,” said McMillin. 

“It really is a wonderful place and a step back in time. I go there often when I need a break from the strip malls and traffic. It takes me back to the quieter, more gentle Florida of my childhood,” said Hammer Cardenas, who grew up in Naples.

Though visitors on Saturday weren’t there to get mail or trade in fur, much else resembled the yesteryears of people gathering at the red wooden building to socialize and catch up on the news. An antique vending machine serving glass-bottled Coca-Cola sits close to the door.

“Because a Coca Cola really is better in a bottle,” said McMillin.

Like her ancestors before her, McMillin sat at a wooden table inside the store on Saturday, sharing stories with visitors. It’s as if time stood still at the store with magazines from decades ago laid upon the countertops. Yet modernization creeps in, as McMillin shares the recent story of a person catching hundreds of pounds of python— the most ever caught in a day with photographs of the catch kept on her cellphone. 

Along with these current events, history rolls off McMillin's tongue with so much ease; she said she should start orating history without realizing, it seems, that she already has.

At the window near the table where she sits is the likeness of her grandfather, a man whom she had never met. He had moved the Smallwood Store from the family home to the site of the current store in 1917. Ted Smallwood had died on his way to the hospital in Naples, nearly 40 miles away, and had made it as close to what was then Ingram’s Hardware Store on 5th Avenue South, McMillin recounted. Roy Lee “Bud” Ingram, 89, who ran his parent’s hardware store for some time, passed away this past March 14.

It's families like his, the Santinis, now of Fort Myers Beach, and the Watsons of the Florida Keys, among others, who visit the Smallwood Store looking at the names of their ancestors in the journals or speaking of the related artifacts throughout the store-turned-museum. 

The store includes photographs and memorabilia of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes, whose support for the historical site keeps it going to this day, said McMillin. 

“The store is a big part of their history. Because some of them, when we first started this store, said my grandfather was the first white person they’d ever seen,” said McMillin. 

After the three Seminole Wars, they had little contact with the outside world, she added.

They came to trade. “It was a big deal that he was a white guy,” McMillin said. He learned to speak their language and tried to help them a lot too, she added. 

She keeps history “they don’t want anyone to know” from the time following the Seminole Wars. “My grandmother wrote it in the family Bible,” said McMillin. 

She recalled a time when her father took her to the place where the third war ended. “My Dad went down there, grabbed a handful of muck that was nothing but teeth and bones,” she recalled. “They surrounded the island and starved them (Miccosukee and Seminole people) and killed them as they swam off,” recounted McMillin.

The horrific site is about 12 miles offshore close to Alligator Creek, said McMillin, remembering a trip she took at about nine years old in the mid-1960s. 

“That’s the perfect example of why they will never trust a white man. Because of the way they were done. I don’t care how many generations have gone by,” she said. 

“But they trusted my grandfather and it helped the store a lot,” McMillin added. 

“There was a good relationship with Seminole and Miccosukee people,” said McMillin, who maintains similar relationships, continuing to buy and sell the Tribe’s wares and goods. 

Smallwood Store Saved by Stilts, a Hatchet and Hard Pine

The family credits not just the stilts but a hatchet to saving the Smallwood Store over the years. 

“Chief James Billie said to place a hatchet on the piling like he did on the chickee he built down by the water's edge in front of our home to protect it from the approaching storm,” said McMillin. 

The hatchet would split the storm and make it go around the structure, keeping it safe, she said. 

That’s exactly what happened during Hurricane Ian in 2022, where the hatchet’s blade was dug into the wood piling and rope tied the handle tight. 

“This is the third time it has done its job and made me a believer,” exclaimed McMillin after the storm passed.

“We got a direct hit with Irma and with Ian we got the dirty side," she said. "The dirty side means you get the water,” she explained.

The decision to lift the store came after a storm brought water in through the front door in 1924. 

“My grandfather raised it up in 1924 because he almost lost it in another hurricane,” said McMillin. “He would have lost it. It’s had water to the floor seven times, and during Ian, water was within a foot of the floor,” she said.

There were too many storms to keep track of over the years, McMillin added. 

Chokoloskee is said to be a Seminole name meaning “old house” and the Island is one of the Ten Thousand Islands that was accessed only by boat or ferry until 1956, when a causeway was built connecting it to the mainland and bringing cars to the island. The store is on Mamie Street, named after McMillin’s grandmother, who passed before she was born.

Ted Smallwood’s Store was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, with support from the Tribes, said McMillin. It remained open until 1982. For fewer than 10 years, over the past 118, the store was closed. 

For a long time it was operated by McMillin’s Aunt Thelma— a woman who never drove and rarely left Chokoloskee, said McMillin. 

In 1910, outlaw Edgar Watson was murdered outside the store by Chokoloskee residents outraged by Watson’s repetitive violence, including allegedly murdering people rather than paying them, though people debate that history to this day.

A replica of Smallwood, who was reportedly not a shooter in the incident, sits with his high-waisted brown pants drawn above his belly, a distinct mustache, white button-down shirt, wire-rimmed glasses and a straw hat, eyes facing an open window overlooking Chokoloskee bay. 

McMillin recalls the making of the replica of her grandfather by the late Mark Appleby, a historian, of Fort Myers. 

“Mark lived on the Caloosahatchee [River]. When he was finishing up grandpa, he put him in the backyard and tied him to the chair to put on the finishing touches,” recalled McMillin. “Someone called elderly abuse on him. The cops came knocking on the door,” she continued. “‘I guess you really did almost too good of a job,’” she had told Appleby.

She recalls the hermits of the Everglades, including Roy Osmer, a writer for Collier County News. She has his dog Boyjun’s tombstone in the store, the inscription still legible through barnacles, “a boy angel with fleas on.” 

McMillin has seen one panther in her life and recalls a time when it was legal to eat ibis, which she calls curlew or Chokoloskee chicken. 

The resilience of the town and the store is multifaceted. 

The wood of the store is original, said McMillin. It’s made of a wood now on the brink of extinction.

“It’s Dade County pine and that is why it’s still there. It’s such a hardwood, termites can’t destroy it. It’s had a lot of things to withstand over the years. Termites are one of them. Storms are another,” she said. 

Further, the shell mounds of the tribal Calusa continue to provide a lift from the damage of floods, said McMillin. The family built their bathrooms on wheels, she added. They can disassemble them and get them out of the store and high on a hill, one of many owned by her family, who bought the island from the Santini family, she said. 

On the one hand she described feeling betrayed by the promises of land ownership and use with the coming of Everglades National Park, but on the other hand, she is grateful for the Park, she said. 

“There’s so much development. Seems it’s not going to stop. Even though Everglades National Park took property away from my family, took our livelihood away from us, I’m kind of glad we have the Park now. Otherwise, we’d look like the rest of Florida with a sign saying which town you’re in now,” said McMillin.

Visit the Smallwood Store

For 118 years, the Smallwood Store has served the people of Chokoloskee whether longtime residents of the Everglades or visitors. Though you may no longer buy fur or hides there, you can still get a gator head, now from McMillin’s daughter's alligator farm in LaBell; a Seminole craft; a t-shirt or other memento while perusing artifacts and hearing a story. 

You can rent a two-bedroom vacation home or take a daily tour with a captain who has generations of knowledge and stories to tell. 

360 Mamie St, Chokoloskee, FL 34138. 239-695-2989.

SmallwoodStoreBoatTour.com and SmallwoodStore.com