Barron Collier chose the town of Everglade, with a population of less than twelve families, as the hub of his sprawling Southwest Florida empire - a tropical "Eden" as large as the state of Delaware.

The town was renamed Everglades and became the County seat when Collier County was formed in 1923.

Although few believed him at the time, Collier announced an ambitious economic plan to bring new vitality and development to South Florida's swamp and wilderness. From the very beginning, considerable care and financial risk went into planning every detail for transforming Everglades into a modern 1920s community. The Allen River was re-christened the Barron River and dredged for fill-in to raise the town site above the level of the surrounding mangrove swamp. As the new town began to take shape, a vanguard of surveyors, engineers and architects went to work landscaping and laying out docks, buildings, streets and railroads.

New home construction was a major undertaking. Houses were built to fit a particular site and uniformly painted a deep cream color with green or dull red roofs, giving Everglades a military or "company" town appearance.

True to his word, before long Collier had provided the residents with power and running water, regular mail and steamship service, a two-room schoolhouse, clinic, fire department, movie theater, a weekly newspaper, and even a 45-room hotel managed by a top Bavarian chef. The Manhattan Mercantile Corporation, another Collier interest, ran a well-stocked department store, gasoline stations and a wholesale petroleum firm. The Bank of Everglades (the first bank in the area) opened just two days after Collier County was created, on July 9, 1923.

A master communicator, Collier made sure that the town of Everglades had reliable telephone and telegraph connections with Fort Myers and New York City long before it had road access to the outside world. His Inter-County Telegraph & Telephone Company, a thirteen-county network, eventually grew into the United Telephone Company.