The Calusa fished, gathered shellfish, and built shell mounds along the Imperial River and Estero Bay coast for thousands of years before European contact; the great shell-mound capital at Mound Key, just north of Bonita in Estero Bay, still rises more than thirty feet above the water. The Spanish arrived in 1513 with Juan Ponce de León and made their first serious attempt to establish a foothold at Mound Key in 1567; the British took Florida in 1763 and gave it back in 1783; the United States annexed the territory in 1821; and Florida became the 27th state on March 3, 1845. U.S. Army surveyors first crossed the area during the Third Seminole War in the 1850s, and a second crew came through in the 1870s and pitched their long camp along what they called Surveyor's Creek — the camp that gave Survey its name, and the river the name it carried until 1912.
The pioneer era began with Braxton Bragg Comer in the late 1880s and ran on small-grower citrus and tomato production through the freeze years and into the new century. The Tennessee investor J.H. Ragsdale and his Fort Myers partner Dan Farnsworth platted the town and rebranded the place in 1912 with names — Bonita Springs, Imperial River — that the developers thought would sell to settlers and winter visitors. The infrastructure followed in a fast four-step run: the 1917 road to Fort Myers, the 1920s Fort Myers Southern Branch of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, the 1926 Liles Hotel on the Imperial River — the building that today houses the Bonita Springs Historical Society after the City of Bonita Springs renovated it in 2006 — and the 1928 completion of the Tamiami Trail through town, which gave Bonita its long downtown spine along what is now Old 41.
Why People Visit Bonita Springs Florida
Bonita Springs offers the Imperial River corridor through downtown, the 1926 Liles Hotel and 1936 Wonder Gardens on Old 41, the public Gulf shoreline of Bonita Beach Park, the four-island Lovers Key State Park preserved by Florida in 1983, the Collier County dunes of Barefoot Beach Preserve north of Wiggins Pass, the Calusa shell-mound capital at Mound Key in Estero Bay, and the Tamiami Trail roadside-Florida lineage that runs from Tampa through Bonita to Miami. It is a Southwest Florida coastal river city built by U.S. Army surveyors, rebranded by Tennessee investors in 1912, and rebuilt twice in the modern era after Donna and Ian. On the Paradise Coast since 1912.
