"Untold Stories"

The Immokalee episode premieres Friday at 8:30 p.m. on WGCU, cable channel 3, and will be reshown Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 27, at 11 p.m. There will be a free public screening at the Seminole Casino in Immokalee on Wednesday as part of the Immokalee Chamber of Commerce’s regular Business After Hours event from 5 to 7 p.m. There will be a cash bar, and refreshments provided by the casino. Attendees can also meet the film’s producer and those featured in the documentary. For details, call (239) 657-3237.

WGCU Public Media

Pioneer and family patriarch Robert Roberts, date unknown.

Courtesy of WGCU Public Media

Main Street circa 1928, with gas and ice cream available.

Courtesy of WGCU Public Media

Downtown business district in 1927, with a post office at right, gas station and "department store’’ at left.

Photo courtesy of WGCU

WGCU-TV’s "Untold Stories" series debuts an episode on the history of Immokalee, "Outpost of Opportunity," on Friday at 8:30 p.m., Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 27, at 11 p.m. Part of the story is about Robert Roberts, who brought his family to Immokalee in 1914. They ran a bustling general store "in town" in the mid-1930s and transformed their original 300 head of cattle into the long-running Red Cattle Co.

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Photos courtesy of WGCU Public Media; from collections of the Roberts and Brown families and the Collier County Museum.

Isolated inland from Southwest Florida’s coastal towns, "Gopher Ridge" was a swampy, inhospitable wilderness populated by Seminoles and Miccosukees, runaway slaves, Civil War deserters and social outcasts.

During the last year of the Civil War, the remote land was "discovered" by the Confederate Cattle Battalion of Florida, ordered to corral cattle to feed the starving South. One member of the troop, Charles Hendry, returned to build a cabin in 1869 and to resume his former occupation of rounding up cows.

Fellow cavalry member William Allen took over the cabin around 1872 and lived off the land at "Allen’s Place" with his family for 40 years.

It was the meager beginnings of what would one day become Immokalee. The sometimes colorful, sometimes poignant story of the evolution of Immokalee is explored in WGCU-TV’s latest "Untold Stories" episode, "Outpost of Opportunity.’’

"Initially settlers came to Immokalee for cattle operations. This was the open range. This high, dry land is the highest natural point in Collier County," Immokalee Pioneer Museum Manager Lee Mitchell explains in the half-hour documentary. "As a result, Miccosukee and Seminoles had cow pens here — and that’s what attracted other people here."

With no roads — just trails that wound around ponds and through wetlands — horses and canoes provided the major modes of transportation. Only the most rugged and resourceful of pioneers managed to prosper.

One of those was William Henry "Bill" Brown, who fled his affluent family in England following the death of his parents. Bill Brown worked on a boat from his homeland to Key West, to Punta Rassa and into Fort Myers, where he opened his own store. He also met and married Sarah Jane Jernigan. "…They lived in Fort Myers where four of her 10 children were born. The other six were born in Immokalee," their grandson Percy Brown, later recalled.

In 1885, Brown opened a trading post, Brown’s Landing, on a patch of high ground and put to use his fluency in the Seminole language. The Seminoles trusted Brown and brought him hides, plumes and other commodities, which Brown hauled overland with ox and cart to Fort Myers on a 10-day journey.

Episcopalian Bishop William Crane Gray moved in to run a mission for his church. When he inquired about filing an application for a post office, at the 1897 dedication, one of Brown’s daughters reportedly said: "Since it is my home and the Indians’, why not call it by their word which means that: Immokalee?"

The Robert Roberts family relocated to Allen’s cabin in 1914. They eventually transformed their original 300 head of cattle into a sprawling empire called the Red Cattle Co. (A portion of Roberts Ranch is now owned by Collier County and open to the public as the Immokalee Pioneer Museum. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.)

Industries in Immokalee got a shot in the arm with the arrival of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad in 1921. But life for the dozen or so families would continue to be trying for the next two decades.

"This show is about the people, not so much buildings," says WGCU producer Mike Gulnac. "These early settlers and Seminoles didn’t think about one place; they were constantly moving from place to place. They were relying on the same resources, so the small communities were interrelated."

Florida land prices sank in the mid-1920s, followed by the nation’s Great Depression. In 1932, the Texas fever tick and fence laws radically changed the way the cattle industry operated. From the mid-1930s to the 1940s, temporary sawmills moved in to turn cypress and Florida long-leaf yellow pine trees into lumber.

"Immokalee exploded just all of a sudden with the sawmills … In my memories, that was the most exciting time for the residents of Immokalee," Grace Mildred Roberts Sherrod, who was born on Roberts Ranch, later recalled. "It was just a delightful little Western town, you know, in South Florida."

A second Immokalee episode, delving into Immokalee’s history since World War II, is being planned.