Marco Island,through time.

Era 1 · 1300–1513

Calusa and their ancestors

Marco Island has about 6,000 years of human habitation. The rare wooden and fiber artifacts found at Key Marco are most often attributed to the late precontact Calusa (1300-1513 CE) or the earlier Glades culture, and the Calusa dominated Florida's southwest coast for centuries.

Era 2 · 1870–1929

Pioneer villages of Marco and Caxambas

From the 1870s pioneers settled the north and south ends of the island, where the villages of Marco and Caxambas grew up. Each village had hotels, general stores, post offices and clam factories, and their economies centered on farming, fishing and clamming.

Image shown for this era: Hand-drawn map of the Key Marco site at the north end of Marco Island, made for the report on the 1895-1896 Pepper-Hearst Expedition led by Frank Hamilton Cushing.. Image1896 · Wells M. Sawyer, Pepper-Hearst Expedition report (Smithsonian Institution), via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · Source

Era 3 · 1930–1963

Clam decline and Collier ownership

Beginning in the 1930s the clam beds were overfished and the villages of Marco and Caxambas declined. Barron Collier's family bought most of the island, and in 1949 the remaining Caxambas homes were moved to Goodland.

Image shown for this era: 1940 census map of southwestern Collier County, drawn on the 1936 State Road Department county map, with Marco Island outlined as Precinct 4 (Marco), the Caxambas precinct to the east, the Ten Thousand Islands and the Gulf of Mexico.. Image1940 · U.S. Census Bureau, 1940 Census Enumeration District Maps, Collier County (National Archives 5829620), via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · Source

Era 4 · 1964–1979

Deltona's planned community

In 1964 the Collier family sold the land to the Mackle brothers of the Deltona Corporation, who dredged and filled to give the island its present shape. The Deltona years of the 1960s and 1970s turned Marco into a vacation and year-round residential island, until permit fights led Deltona to give up its master plan.

Image shown for this era: Aerial view, July 1972, of a newly dredged grid of canals and bare fill lots behind a mangrove-lined Gulf beach on Marco Island, with a boat speeding along the shore.. Image1972 · Fred Ward, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (DOCUMERICA), U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · Source

Era 5 · 1980–1996

A growing island before cityhood

The island kept growing as unincorporated Collier County. Residents worried about losing local heritage founded the Marco Island Historical Society in 1994, and there were five failed attempts to incorporate before 1997.

Image shown for this era: 1995 USGS topographic map of Marco Island, showing the island's dredged canal neighborhoods and streets, Collier Boulevard, the bridges to the mainland, and the surrounding bays and mangrove islands.. Image1995 · U.S. Geological Survey, Marco Island, Fla. 7.5-minute quadrangle (1995), via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · Source

Era 6 · 1997–2026

City of Marco Island

Marco Island became Florida's 398th city in 1997. The Marco Island Historical Museum opened in 2010-2011, and the city took Hurricane Irma's final Florida landfall in 2017.

Image shown for this era: Sunny aerial view over Marco Island's canal neighborhoods: tile-roofed homes with screened pools, palms and private docks along the waterways, with the bridge to the mainland on the horizon.. Image2015 · Drew Townsend (YouTube still), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY · Source