What’s with the Key Marco Cat? In 1896 an archaeologist named Frank Hamilton Cushing led a Smithsonian expedition into a muddy pond on the edge of this island and pulled out one of the great treasures of American archaeology. The waterlogged, airless muck had preserved what almost never survives: wood. More than a thousand carved wooden objects came up — masks, animal figureheads, tools a thousand years old — and among them a six-inch statuette of a kneeling, half-human, half-panther figure. Many of the other wooden objects, preserved only by the airless muck, dried out and fell apart soon after they reached the surface — which is part of why the surviving Cat is treasured as it is. The Key Marco Cat is now counted among the finest works of pre-Columbian art in North America. It sits today in the island’s history museum, on loan from the Smithsonian — a small wooden cat that has watched over Marco’s story for a thousand years.
When Ponce de León’s Spanish reached this coast in the early 1500s, they named the island La Isla de San Marco and met the Calusa, who fought them off; by the 1700s, war and disease had emptied the chiefdom. Centuries later the pioneers came. William T. Collier founded the village of Marco in 1870, and his son, Capt. Bill Collier, opened the Olde Marco Inn in 1896 — still serving guests today. For decades the island ran on clams and oysters, canned at Caxambas Pass and shipped north.
Why People Visit Marco Island
Marco Island rewards visitors who want wide white sand, warm shallow water, and shells underfoot, with a rare depth of history close by. Add the boat trips into the Ten Thousand Islands and the year-round Gulf sun, and the case makes itself.
