Marco Island Historical Museum

The Marco Island Historical Museum and cultural complex brings to life a long held dream of the Marco Island Historical Society. Created through a partnership with the MIHS and Collier County Museums, this addition to the county's museum system explores Southwest Florida’s Calusa Indians and features colorful, exciting and informative displays to bring this vanished civilization to life. One whole room is dedicated to a replica of a Calusa village and its inhabitants going about their daily lives.

The grounds are landscaped with ponds, waterfalls and native, tropical plantings. These peaceful surroundings set off this gem, and include an inviting gazebo where one can take a few moments to enjoy its ambiance, including a large bronze replica of the “Key Marco Cat.”

Within the museum is a traveling exhibits gallery, showcasing the work of artists from around the world illustrating, through various mediums, the local flora, fauna and the history of the area. Each new exhibit is celebrated with an opening reception to which the public is invited. The Museum Gift Store offers artwork, jewelry, clothing, local and regional historical books, and many gift items. The museum complex is further enriched by the beautiful Rose History Auditorium, a multi-functional facility that is available for rent for a variety of private and public functions and celebrations.

Paradise Found – 6,000 Years of People On Marco Island chronicles the oldest-known residents of Marco Island through interactive displays and artifacts. Included is a life-size diorama of a Calusa village of the period.

This exhibition engages, inspires, and educates visitors about the remarkably complex Native American people who called Marco Island home for more than 6,000 years. In addition to original artwork, replicas, and research, the exhibit showcases more than 200 pre-Columbian artifacts from Marco Island and its surrounding community. These artifacts comprise a small fraction of the collections being preserved in perpetuity by the MIHS. Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1896 discovery of wooden masks, figurines, and implements – many with original paint still visible – remain some of the most spectacular examples of pre-Columbian Native American artistry ever discovered. The objects, now at the Smithsonian Institution, Florida Museum of Natural History, and University of Pennsylvania, are so stunning that they often overshadow the fascinating people that made them.

Spanish chroniclers in the sixteenth century, called the natives they encountered in Southwest Florida, “Calusa.” This was thought to mean “the Fierce Ones” (Willingess, 1984). They were described as “tall of stature, great archers and men of strength.” Also, they “had no gold, no silver, and less clothing. They go naked, the men in a small loin cloth woven of palm fiber, the women in a skirt of a grass that grows on trees, and looks like silk.” For two hundred years the Calusa held the Spaniards at bay, until they finally succumbed to European introduced diseases, such as smallpox and measles, in addition to warfare and slavery from raiding tribes to the north. Therefore, our knowledge about their remarkable culture must be gleaned from scarce reports by undaunted missionaries and the results of modern archaeological excavations.

Image courtesy of Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution (A240915)

The Key Marco Cat is one of the finest pieces of Pre-Columbian Native American art ever discovered in North America. At only six inches tall and carved from native hardwood, the Key Marco Cat is a charismatic anthropomorphic feline statuette that has captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.

An unprecedented five-year loan extension by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History continues the original 2019-2021 loan of Key Marco artifacts for another five years. This is the longest period of time that the Key Marco Cat has been on loan to any other institution ever. Visitors to the Marco Island Historical Museum (MIHM) now can view the enigmatic feline through 2026.

Created some 500 to 1,500 years ago by Southwest Florida’s early Calusa people or their Muspa ancestors, the Key Marco Cat is reunited with other rare pre-Columbian artifacts discovered on Key Marco in 1896 during a Smithsonian sponsored archaeological expedition led by archaeologist and anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. This expedition produced some of the greatest discoveries in the history of North American archaeology.

Because they were buried in an oxygen-free layer of muck, the rare wooden objects were astonishingly well preserved. Many began disintegrating upon exposure to the air. However, expedition artist Wells M. Sawyer recorded their original details and colors in field photographs and watercolors. Surviving artifacts and field recordings provide extraordinary insight into the lives of the Calusa. Since their discovery, the returning Key Marco artifacts have been preserved by the Smithsonian and University of Pennsylvania (UPENN).

The MIHS has mounted the exhibit in collaboration with Collier County Museums, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The loaned artifacts are featured within the Museum’s award-winning permanent exhibit — Paradise Found: 6,000 Years of People on Marco Island — that includes interactive activity stations, state-of-the-art projections and animations, original artwork depicting the Cushing expedition and the daily activities and ceremonies of the Calusa and their ancestors as well as an immersive life-size Calusa Village.