Amy Bennett Williams

awilliams@news-press.com

In a fiery twist of fate, it was a stunt camera shot that reduced Monroe Station, the most photographed landmark in the Big Cypress, to smoking ashes.

A south Florida man admitted he accidentally sparked the blaze that devoured the historic Tamiami Trail building last month.

Historic Monroe Station on Tamiami Trail in Big Cypress burns

The man, who's not yet been named in the ongoing investigation, said he climbed onto the abandoned way station's roof the night of April 9 to create a sparkler-style image by spinning a wad of flaming steel wool as two others took pictures of him from the ground, according to Big Cypress National Preserve spokesman Bob DeGross.

Sometimes called “painting with light,” this kind of photography has been popular for a few years, said Jacksonville photographer Chris Alvarez. “Basically what you do is get an egg whisk, tie a rope to it, stuff a steel wool pad inside, light it, then spin it in whatever design you want.”

The resulting images can be visually dramatic, with arcing loops of light and showers of comet-tailed embers. Of course, if those embers rain down on combustible material, such as, say, a 9-decade-old building, bad things can happen.

In the case of Monroe Station, the trio of photographers told investigators they tried to put the fire out, but it got out of hand so fast they took off.

“I’ve heard of people catching trees on fire before, but never anything like this,” said Alvarez, who’s not had any mishaps with the technique. “That’s why you want to make sure you’re not around leaves or things that would burn.”

It took less than three hours for the blaze to obliterate the National Register of Historic Places building, even with firefighters battling it.

April 11, the day after it was extinguished, the primary suspect turned himself in.

So far, no one has been federally charged, said William Daniels, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office of Florida's middle district. "At this point, I couldn’t speculate on any charges," Daniels said.

Before it burned, Monroe Station was one of two of the original six outposts on the Tamiami Trail. The other, Royal Palm Hammock station, still sells gas, live shrimp and sweet tea.

Originally constructed in the 1920s by advertising magnate and land tycoon Barron Gift Collier, who'd also bankrolled the Trail's construction, the remote oases, staffed by lawmen and their wives, offered gas, food and security to motorists traversing the two-lane Everglades highway.

Their heyday was short. By 1934, Collier had disbanded the force and sold the stations. One was moved to Everglades City and converted into a house, DeGross said, and two were demolished.

Monroe Station changed hands and identities many times in the following decades. It was still a honky-tonk roadhouse as late as the 1980s, when photographer Niki Butcher, who'd moved to the Big Cypress with her husband, Clyde, snapped a now-iconic photo of it, which she turned into a popular hand-colored print.

In recent years, the National Park Service had been working to get grants to restore the boarded-up building, which remained hauntingly picturesque – a touchstone for travelers and a magnet for photographers.

The building's loss is just the latest in a series Fort Myers historian and real estate appraiser Woody Hanson has mourned. For Hanson, it's deeply personal. He's the grandson of W. Stanley Hanson, one of the Tamiami Trailblazers, a group that made the first Florida coast-to-coast trek on the road in 1928, ushering in the era of cross-Everglades travel.

"Always a battleground between man and nature," he said, "the Tamiami Trail again buries her dead."