In the 1920s, the Everglades Drainage District sold Florida farmland to buyers across the country with a brochure that called it "Reclaimed Agricultural Paradise — The Richest Soil in America."

One farmer kept a ledger. Temperature readings, dates, observations — documented in the same upright hand, column by column, for two years. He wrote letters to the District. Seven of them. He received seven identical replies.

Eighteen months before he started writing those letters, the District had quietly purchased fire insurance on its own infrastructure.

They knew. They filed the paperwork. They kept digging.

"The Muck Fire"

by Roz Stevens