Editing Collier County, Florida (section)

==History==
[[Archaeology]] at [[Platt Island]] in the [[Big Cypress National Preserve]] shows humans settled in what is now Collier County more than 2000 years ago.<ref name=Widmer>{{cite book |last=Widmer |first=Randolph J. |date=1988 |title=Evolution of the Calusa: a Stratified Non-Agricultural Chiefdom on the Southwest Florida Coast |url=https://archive.org/details/evolutioncalusan00widm |url-access=limited |publisher=University of Alabama Press |page=[https://archive.org/details/evolutioncalusan00widm/page/n90 72] |chapter=The Prehistory of Southwest Florida|isbn=9780817303587}}</ref> The [[Calusa]] people had an extensive presence in the area when Europeans arrived.

[[File:Ted Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island.jpg|thumb|Ted Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island]]

The county was created in 1923 from [[Lee County, Florida|Lee County]]. It was named for [[Barron Collier]], a New York City advertising mogul and real estate developer who had moved to [[Southwest Florida]] and established himself as a prominent landowner. He agreed to build the [[Tamiami Trail]] for what was then Lee County (comprising today's Collier, Hendry, and Lee Counties) in exchange for favorable consideration with the state legislature to have a county named for him. After Collier County was named, Collier was quoted as saying: "When I first came here on holiday with Juliet, I never expected that I would buy a whole region of it, nor did I expect to pay for the new Tamiami Trail, or half the things I've done. But I really didn't expect to have a whole county named after me."<ref>{{cite book |first=James C. |last=Clark |title=A Concise History of Florida |publisher=Arcadia |year=2014 |page=150 |isbn=9781625851536 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iBl3CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT150}}</ref>