Here is a true story that is strangely familiar. On the tip of end of the Florida peninsula (in the Florida Everglades) is the small town of Flamingo. The town was established in 1893, named after the most common bird folks could see around them. It was kind of a fishing port and described as a very unpleasant” “A village of shacks on stilts, infested with fleas and mosquitoes.”
On the front of most houses is what is called the “Mosquito Room,” an entire room where you brush off the mosquitoes before entering the home. I have been there and am told there are 33 different kinds of salt-water mosquitoes (very big and resilient) in an around Flamingo When I was there we had to run from the car to the house to avoid being eaten by the swarms of mosquitoes. You get the idea. And in the beginning there were NO ROADS into Flamingo. Access was by boat only.
The point of this story is that when the Army Core of Engineers finally put in a road to Flamingo, sometime in the early 1900s, within a short time after the road was completed almost the entire town packed up and moved out ‘en masse’, leaving maybe 10-15 homes. Sound familiar?
