Cross State Highway: The Florida highway that never was

It's the biggest regional rivalry you've likely never heard of, yet its outcome affects daily life in Southwest Florida.

Every time a motorist shoots across the Caloosahatchee bridge to North Fort Myers or curses the traffic on U.S. 41 in Bonita Springs, they're interacting with the Tamiami Trail, the storied route that slices through the region on its way between Tampa and Miami.

Completed in 1928 the Trail became Florida's most famous interstate highway, the subject of poems, songs and innumerable news reports.

But had another set of investors and boosters gotten their way, a road named the Cross State Highway would have been the preferred coast-to-coast route, cutting through the state from Arcadia to Miami.

The highway battle and how the Trail won is the subject of a new article by SouthWestern State College professor Theresa Hamilton Proverbs. "We Built That: The Lost Fight for Florida's Cross State Highway," published in the Journal of Planning History, is a rigorously researched academic work, to be sure, but a fascinating read for anyone interested in the region's history.

Though there's no question the building of the Tamiami Trail was "an epic feat of engineering (that)enabled the development of South Florida," Proverbs writes, "historical accounts ignore routinely its rival, the Cross State Highway."

Proverbs, an architect and LaBelle resident, spent several years at work on the article, scouring libraries for old newspaper and magazine accounts from the 1920s and earlier, when the young state was developing its infrastructure, much of it with private investments.

Any town on a major highway was bound to grow differently than a backwater, Proverbs says. "It determined how Southwest Florida developed... If the Cross-State Highway had been chosen as the interstate highway, it would have gone through Arcadia, LaBelle, Bermont and all those little towns that have now disappeared."

Much of the way things played out came down to marketing and politicking.

"The individuals who were building the Cross State Highway didn't have the political savvy that the proponents of the Tamiami Trail had," Proverbs says, plus, they knew how to myth-make. The project was, after all, largely bankrolled by Barron Collier, the New York magnate who'd made his fortune in advertising. Collier and his folks knew how to harness popular aspirations and fantasies, and so "The Tamiami Trail became this romantic, idyllic highway for travelers to drive on but it also represented conquering the Everglades and progress."

The Cross State Highway advocates, on the other hand, never branded their project, never engaged in popular image-making.

"I could not find any evidence that that Cross State Highway group ever attempted any of that," Proverbs says, "and I looked for it. No matter how many newspapers I read and magazines I went through, I could not find anything similar."

That failure to successfully market the idea had major implications for the region's small interior towns.

"The Tamiami Trail would bypass and isolate the small towns in central Florida the Cross State Highway was proposed to serve. Development would concentrate on Florida's coastal cities; and tourism and real estate would direct the economy," Proverbs writes. "The ultimate selection of the TamiamiTrail route over the Cross State Highway would determine Southwest Florida's economic, political, and social landscape, not just its topography."

It also helped solidify a growing precedent in the state for reliance on privately funded public projects. When Trail building slowed, then stalled because of money troubles, Collier stepped in.

"(He) offered to finance the highway and in exchange the Tamiami Trail would be routed through the newly created and eponymously named Collier County," Proverbs writes. "Barron Gift Collier's influence over planning for the Trail and its victory over the Cross State Highway stands at the nexus of this issue... Collier was not the first individual to offer to underwrite Florida infrastructure in exchange for personal benefit. This is a recurring theme in the history of southwest Florida, and it has had a profound impact on planning and development.

In the end, money and marketing won out.

The battle between the Cross State Highway and the Tamiami Trail was a critical juncture in both Fort Myers' and LaBelle's history, Proverbs says, but it remains tempting to wonder what might have happened had things gone the other way.

"We can look for answers in dates, facts, and figures, in old newspapers and fading photographs," she concludes. " But it is the other half of the story that will always be lost. Standing on a back country road, staring at the shadowy outline of a long vanished ghost town is to truly ask what might have been."

Amy Bennett Williams' Field Notes appear Thursdays and Sundays in The News-Press. Listen to her audiocast on WGCU Friday mornings.

Help re-envision Hendry County's past

Theresa Proverbs is working to record the area's older places. If you have a vintage home or building you'd be willing to let her document for a project on local history, please email her at thamil@strato.net.