The History of Marco Beach: Marco’s Crown Jewel

Some of the greatest writers have extolled the virtues of the beach. T.S. Eliot said, “At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.” Henry David Thoreau said, "My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean’s edge as I can go.” More recently, Jimmy Buffett pondered, “If there’s heaven for me, I’m sure it has a beach attached to it.”

As we celebrate Collier County’s centennial, we find that memories of Marco Beach are etched in the hearts of Pioneer-era Marco Islanders in much the same way they are for modern-day visitors and residents. Perhaps an unknown writer said it best: "Our memories of the ocean will linger on, long after our footprints in the sand are gone."

Marco Island’s glistening crown jewel, its 3.5-mile crescent beach, still looks much the same as it did when Pioneer-era Marco Islanders netted fish, hunted, gathered seashells, and even fell in love there. The beach itself has not changed much over the century. There’s a reason for that, according to Craig Woodward, respected Marco Island attorney and historian.

 “It's been that way for many, many, centuries,” Woodward said. “If you look at Naples Beach, Keewaydin, you go down the coast toward the Keys, these beaches are all straight and long beaches. The reason the beach is curved is because we have two major passes on the north and south. You have the Marco River on the north, and on the south you have Caxambas Pass. And so what happens is the passes don't fill in. They are big passes. Not like Gordon Pass in Naples. Gordon Pass fills in all the time. They’re always dredging Gordon Pass.”

Woodward moved to Marco Island with his parents and twin brother in 1968. But his parents discovered Marco Beach in 1952. He has a treasured color photograph from his parent’s fateful trip.

“My parents saw the beach in 1952 and that was it,” Woodward laughs. "It's amazing to look at that picture and realize that picture is over 70 years ago. My wife Bonnie told me. ‘You've gotta send that picture.' That was her first thing. My dad and mom traveled to Florida with another young couple. My dad was 26 years old, and mom was 25. They drove west across U.S. 41 from the east coast, saw the sign to Marco Island at Collier Seminole State Park. They crossed the swing bridge, drove straight onto what is now Residents' Beach. They took the car onto the beach and pitched this one large tent. They spent the night. My mom, while taking a bath in the Gulf, lost her bar of soap. For years she told people if they found the soap, it was hers,” Woodward said with a laugh. "Next morning they collected a small box of shells, marked the box Marco Island, and it was in our house in Illinois when I was growing up. They drove straight off of the Island, never meeting a single person. They didn't discover Goodland or Old Marco but remembered Marco Island. We came back and camped at Collier Seminole State Park in December of 1967 and moved here permanently in the summer of 1968. So the beach was the only thing they really saw of Marco. It made a huge impression on them, as I know it has to many other people who came later to the Marco Beach Hotel, now the J.W. Marriott, or the Hilton, and prompted them to decide to live here permanently."

Faye Brown was born in 1942 at the Marco townsite now known as Old Marco. In the Pioneer era, folks didn’t live on the beach. The population of the island was concentrated at the Marco, Caxambas, and Goodland townsites.

"During the forties and fifties, Marco Beach was a lot different than it is now,” said Brown. Most times, when my family drove to the beach from the small village where we lived, there would not be another car or person there. We could drive from one end of the beach to the other and see nothing but birds covering the beach along the water's edge.”

There’s an old Florida Cracker saying that goes something like this: You can’t plant anything on the beach except Yankees. 

“I never heard that one,” Brown laughs. “A lot of people first coming to Marco were Yankees. I personally wouldn't want to live on the beach. It was too far away from anything. Gas was expensive during and after the war. It wasn't a good place to tie a boat. I would have been afraid of panthers in those woods along the beach. We at first took the old wagon road to the beach up until the state road was built. Then it was paved all the way. The old wagon road was shell all the way. State Route 92, that went to the beach, was built in 1952. Several people lived in houseboats, or Liders, around the village. There was no money nor building materials to build with after the depression years. You couldn't just go build a house on someone else's property. Most knew that Barron Collier owned all that land adjoining the beach. The family was in New York but everyone I knew respected that it was not theirs to build on. I suppose a person could have had a camper on the old beach road - and may have for all I know. There were better places to park closer to civilization.”

Trips to Marco Beach were a part of Brown’s life from her earliest memories. Her first trip to Marco Beach was a harrowing one.

"My earliest memories are probably when I was about four years of age and was lost in the tall salt water grass,” Brown said. "My family was having a picnic with one of my mom’s sister's family. A couple of my dad's sisters and their husbands had come from the east coast to visit. Aunt Ethel and Uncle Hugh Goldie lived nearby in the woods. Uncle Hugh's dad was Scotty Goldie, who ran the boat from the Burnham Clam Factory to Key West. They had a bunch of boys who had brought some friends with them and were chasing wild hogs across the prairie into the woods. I saw them and decided to follow until they disappeared into the thick wooded area. Then I tried to find my way back to the family picnic. The grasses were too high and I kept following trails that would come to an end. Then I kept backtracking until I finally panicked and began screaming as hard and loud as I could. My Uncle Joe was the first to get to me. When he lifted me up in his arms I could see that I wasn't that far from them. I never forgot that time.”

While shelling has probably never been more popular than it is today, Brown remembers the glory years of shell collecting on Marco Beach in the Pioneer era.

"Our family picked up many shells at the beach and sold some,” Brown said. “They were so plentiful then. We could stand on our front porch and listen to the wind and surf crashing the shells upon the beach. Many times after a northwester, we would go to the beach and find them piled a foot deep.”

Brown remembers another type of shell that was abundant on the island in her youth: clam shells.

"We used to go to Clam Slough on the north end of the beach to bog for clams,” Brown said. “Sometimes, we had to swim across the slough, and that depended on how rough the current was. I must have been about 11 this one time that I went with mama and she left the smaller kids with sister Hilda up beside the car in the soft sandy area, away from the water. We had picked a wash tub almost full when mama told me to carry as many as I could in my tee shirt. When I got back to the slough, it was running rapid and I had to let go of my tee shirt at the bottom to release the clams to keep from drowning. Those little clams most likely bedded down somewhere else and started a new home of clams,” she said with a laugh. "There is nothing better than a warm bowl of fresh clam chowder after you've been clamming all day to get the chill out of your bones.”

Brown remembers accompanying her father on a hunting trip to the beach.

"Our daddy turned a turtle once after letting us watch her lay her eggs,” Brown said. "Our parents sometimes would drive down along the beach and shoot a mess of beach plovers. It tasted like beef chuck steak to us. There was no one else around when they did this. We had the beach all to ourselves.”

Brown’s family eventually moved off the island, but she returned to Marco Beach regularly.

"I was sixteen,” Brown recalls, "my family was living in East Naples. I would get a few friends together and drive them down to Marco Beach on a Saturday to have a picnic. We carried fried chicken, homemade potato salad and would cut and cook swamp cabbage from the old beach road where the pine and cabbage trees grew. 

"When I was seventeen, I was staying with a friend who was also my cousin. We went to the beach shelling and had wiener roasts at the beach at night where we also went swimming. One day, I walked by the magazine rack at the G&G Mercantile store and noticed an article about Lemon sharks swimming along the shores of Africa and Florida, searching for prey in four feet of water. That cured us of swimming at night at the beach."

Brown said it was not unusual for tourists to park their cars too close to the water. 

“All the weekend tourists had to be towed out of the tidal surge,” she said. "Some of the Miami tourists didn't understand about the tides and left their cars parked on the hard packed sand near the water line. They would walk a ways off and when they returned to their car, the water would be coming up into it. My dad would get contacted many times to go pull a car out of the incoming tidal area. He used Mr. Kelly Gantt's box bed fish truck and always carried a long coil of rope to tow them with. I can remember one time after he had gotten rope and shovels together to go help someone, he reached over to pick up a bunch of bananas off the center of our dining room table and asked mama if he could take them to the people. He told her, 'they have been out there all day with nothing to eat or drink.’”

Brown’s fondest memory of Marco Beach came when she was 19. She was with her future husband, Sonny.

“We drive to Marco, park the car, and are walking along the beach looking at the stars,” Brown recalls. "He seemed to know so much about the stars and planets that I was impressed. We stopped for a second and he asked me to go steady with him. I was surprised and said, ‘Don't you think it's a little soon?' He said, ‘Just wait until our next date when I ask you to marry me!' I thought he was crazy, but I guess I was crazy too because I loved it and went home laughing to my mama, telling her that Sonny had plans to ask me to marry him the next night. We were all alone on the beach, had it all to ourselves.

"Sonny proposed to me at the Marco beach in 1961,” Brown said. "It wasn't formal but it has hooked him for sixty-two years,” she laughed. "I was 19, and he was turning 19 on December 19, so that was the date we had planned to get married. After we picked up the license at the Everglades Court House, he said to me, ‘If we could find someone to marry us, we could be married tonight.' So we did and that was on December 4.”

Brown said her family, now living in the mountains of Georgia, reminisced about Sonny’s proposal during their Thanksgiving dinner this year.

"We were laughing because his impulsiveness has caused him 62 years of his freedom,” Brown laughed.