On a Saturday morning in April, dust stirs gold in the rafters as Lynn McMillin flips on the lights at the Smallwood Store in Chokoloskee. She listens to the hum of the little cooler, the fan and the hundred-year-old building settling into the heat. Below her, the black water shifts and sucks at the pilings, and the old boards answer with their faint complaints.
Ted Smallwood, Lynn’s grandfather and the store’s original owner, keeps his eternal watch from a corner, with a Bible and fly swatter in hand. The lifelike recreation of the family patriarch sits across from the service counter, where the wood still bears the nicks and scars of pelts slapped down, measured and traded more than a century ago.
Lynn crosses the floor and straightens a stack of books in the gift shop, wipes a smear from the glass case with the heel of her hand and bends to pick up a postcard somebody dropped crooked in its rack.
Before roads reached Chokoloskee, much of life in the Western Everglades passed through this building. Lynn has spent the better part of four decades looking after what remains. Shelves and walls hold a century of remnants—soap, tins, alligator hides, medicine bottles. Deep in the shadows, the weathered prow of a cypress dugout canoe juts into the aisle, its wood still bearing the marks of hand tools long gone. In the back room, a hanging line with her grandmother’s faded clothes sways in the soft wind. “My aunt kept everything. Thank God she was a pack rat,” she says. The air tastes faintly of salt and old paper.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood outside view
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Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood store
Since 1989, Lynn McMillin has watched over the barn-red trading post raised above the black water of Chokoloskee, a pine-plank remnant of the Everglades frontier.
As the dust settles, Lynn hears voices outside and steps onto the porch, holding the door and nodding the family of four inside. The children go quiet first, stilled by the sight. She watches as they move through the space and gives them room. Then, she points to a shelf and tells them about the store when it was a post office and pharmacy and boatyard besides. She says her grandfather blew a conch shell to announce the arrival of the mail boat, and that the mail came that way until the road was built in 1956, the same year she came into the world. “It was a busy place because it was the only place,” she tells the young girls.
Her grandfather became the town’s postmaster in 1906, first operating out of his farmhouse, then, in 1917, building the store out of Dade County pine. Before the bridge to Everglades City came in, the outpost served a 40-mile radius in a territory otherwise void of law or structure. After Ted retired, Lynn’s mom and aunt kept it running for four decades, holding on against the highway and the grocery chains. In 1982, they locked the doors, leaving everything where it sat.
Lynn reopened the store seven years later, first as a museum, now as the living thing it has become: a gathering place, a boat-tour launch point into the Ten Thousand Islands, a place where locals come through the door carrying artifacts of what was.
By then, the building had sat long enough to gather break-ins, debris and a blanket of dust over the clutter of decades. “We didn’t know what we were getting into, but I promised my mom and aunt I’d keep it going,” Lynn says. It took three months, tetanus shots and fumigation just to clear a path. The years since have brought enough storms, lawsuits and lean seasons for her to understand that every day a place survives is another day earned.
Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood lynn
Lynn, her children and grandchildren spent their childhoods playing under Smallwood Store’s pine rafters. Today, Lynn operates it as a museum and gift shop, while her husband, son and daughter captain charters into the Ten Thousand Islands out back.
In the first years after reopening, there was no running water, but life kept pressing forward inside. Her youngest child was potty-trained here, and a swing was soon hammered into the rafters so the kids were always a few steps away. “We were used to surviving,” she says. “You live on the water, you do whatever the water lets you do.” In the store’s early years, she boiled and sold the stone crab claws her husband couldn’t sell at market to chip away at the long list of repairs. She’d work at the register all day and, at night, scrub crab pots until 1 in the morning. One year, she hand-sewed a mullet net to earn enough to buy her son a birthday present. “If I’d worked this hard at anything else, I’d be a whole lot richer,” Lynn says. She smiles when she says it, but the line between her brows stays deep. “This is what I chose.”
There are people who talk about preservation as if it were an idea. At Smallwood Store, it is a fact of life. It’s Lynn carrying a roll of paper towels under one arm and a cordless drill in the other, checking the register drawer and the weather and if the toilet is working and the dock boards are still holding where they ought to.
A long-handled duster, a mop and Murphy Oil Soap are about all Lynn allows herself for daily upkeep. Anything more can risk smearing old handwriting into nothing. When they first reopened, a preservation engineer walked the floor and taught her how to treat the old wood and metal with drops of oil. Each year, when the summer heat drives the tourists away, Lynn and a helper open the display cases. They bring out a little museum‑grade vacuum with attachments like dentist’s tools and run its soft brush over the labels, barely touching.
Over by the gift shop, Lynn stands with a box between her feet, easing a row of quilted dolls upright along the shelf so they face the door. Earlier that day, two Miccosukee women dropped off a bundle of beaded bracelets and hand-stitched figures in the bright patchwork of the Big Cypress camps. During season, they’ll bring a truck bed full of Tupperware tubs and coolers—the makings of a food stand serving frybread and Indian burgers, the local tribes’ name for a seasoned beef or bison patty tucked between two pieces of golden, pillowy bread. It’s enough to feed a weekend’s worth of visitors. “I’ve known some of these people my whole life,” Lynn says.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood old cash register
Records from the 1900s show a long history of mutual commerce between Seminole and Miccosukee tribes and settlers. In 2011, when developers planned to build a marina complex that could have cut off Smallwood’s road access, tribal leaders stood in hearings to protect the store.
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preserving 100 year old smallwood old sign
When the store marked its centennial earlier this year, tribal flags hung from the porch rail, and Seminole and Miccosukee families cooked and drummed in the yard. Years before that, in 2011, developers had planned to build a marina complex that would have cut off Smallwood’s only road access. It was tribal leaders who sent people to Tallahassee and stood in hearings and wrote letters on Smallwood letterhead. James Billie, then chief of the Seminole Tribe, raised money and raised hell on Lynn’s behalf, because this leaning pine box on stilts holds their history, too. “They underestimated the people who love this store,” Lynn says of the developers. The store’s ledgers show decades of mutual commerce. Her grandfather’s store bridged the gap between isolated settlers, Seminoles, Miccosukee and the outside world during an era of racial segregation and frontier lawlessness.
Lynn’s 9-year-old great-granddaughter is half Miccosukee and now runs under the same pine rafters Lynn counted as a girl. While she is not ready to pass the store on, she does wonder if the little one might take to it one day. Being part of the tribe, she may have access to a larger community network positioned to carry history forward. “They have resources,” Lynn says. “Mine are all dead.” She says it plain, without ceremony, as if naming a thing long settled in the world.
The building’s Dade County pine is stubborn. Dense enough that you burn up drill bits trying to get through it. But it is not immortal. Every year, the salt air chews at the pilings and the floorboards, and every year, Lynn must decide what she can afford to fix and what she will pray over instead.
Lynn looks out to the skiffs, bobbing beside their docks. Her husband, Gary, started running charters out of the site after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 destroyed his traps. Her son and daughter hold captain’s licenses as well. The tours now keep the Smallwood Store alive, running from the dock seven days a week.
Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood old shelves
Shelves hold a century of remnants—soaps, tins, medicine bottles—cataloging the store’s history, from its beginnings as a post office, trading post and pharmacy.
The money that comes in goes to the hidden things. The annual termite inspection. The electrician’s bill when the salt works its way into the wiring. The preservation‑grade storage unit in town, where she keeps the most fragile papers and photographs. “That storage is a big bill for us,” she says. “But if we don’t pay it, we lose what we’re trying to save.”
Water has come to the floor six times since the building was raised, with Donna, Wilma and a number of older, unnamed storms. Irma, Ian, Helene and Milton came within a foot. The names pass through local speech like kinfolk you never wanted but know by heart. Lynn knows which screen to cut before the wind takes the whole frame, where to put the boats and that the bathrooms built on skids must be hauled up the hill, so they don’t become battering rams between the stilts. “Always something. If it’s not a storm, it’s the wood. If it’s not the wood, it’s the salt,” she says.
Around midday, she moves to the back and kneels where the room meets the porch, pressing her palm to the boards to check for softness. She nods to herself, then straightens. Beside her, an old cradle, used by Ted’s children, ruffles the bottom of her shirt. “So many have left this island. But I stayed, because I want this life. It’s a hard one, but it’s a freer one, too,” Lynn says. “You can’t see the Gulf from Tamiami Trail anymore, but the water’s still there, and I can get in a boat and ride it.” The designation of Everglades National Park roiled some, but it kept the Glades from looking like the rest of Florida, Lynn says, overpopulated and overdeveloped.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood old pictures
Lynn builds exhibits around local artifacts families bring in—old photos, historic tools, ledgers. The gift shop highlights Miccosukee craftsmanship, with beaded bracelets and hand-stitched dolls.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
preserving 100 year old smallwood oustide view
People bring in things all the time—sepia pictures, a rusted knife, a ledger from somebody’s daddy. “When people donate, we’ll build an exhibit around what they’ve brought, so their family is part of it too,” Lynn says.
She has begun talking about doing a podcast, interviewing the families who come back now, with photographs in envelopes and stories carried down from grandparents who bought flour here, fetched mail, or waited at the dock. She likes that part best, perhaps. The door opening, somebody stepping in out of the light with some piece of the past in hand. Too much vanishes when people die, she says, and too much has already gone under in this state.
Inside, a visitor thanks Lynn on the way out and says what a treasure this is. Lynn smiles at that, polite and brief. Then she goes back in and straightens the postcards again.