Hamilton Disston was an industrialist and real-estate developer who purchased 4 million acres (16,000 km²) of Florida land in 1881, an area larger than the state of Connecticut, and reportedly the most land ever purchased by a single person in world history. Disston was the son of Pennsylvania-based industrialist Henry Disston who formed Disston & Sons Saw Works, which Hamilton later ran and which was one of the largest saw manufacturing companies in the world.
Hamilton Disston
A photograph taken circa 1900 showing a canal dredged by Disston's company, running through a sugar plantation also owned by Disston near St. Cloud, Florida
Disston family mausoleum in Laurel Hill Cemetery
The Everglades is a natural region of flooded grasslands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large drainage basin within the Neotropical realm. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles (97 km) wide and over 100 miles (160 km) long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state. The Everglades experiences a wide range of weather patterns, from frequent flooding in the wet season to drought in the dry season. Throughout the 20th century, the Everglades suffered significant loss of habitat and environmental degradation.
The most prominent feature of the Everglades are the sawgrass prairies found across the region.
A satellite image of the Everglades, taken in March 2019
Hurricane Charley in 2004 moving ashore on South Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast
A storm over the Shark River in the Everglades, 1966