The 1936 Wonder Gardens era is the second chapter. Bill and Lester Piper opened their roadside attraction on Old 41 on February 22, 1936, as the Everglades Reptile Gardens; the name moved to the Everglades Wonder Gardens as the exhibits broadened, and the family ran it for three generations until 2013. The City of Bonita Springs bought the property in 2015 to keep it from commercial development, and a non-profit has operated it since on city-owned land. The Wonder Gardens — three and a half acres on Old 41 — is one of the oldest continuously operating roadside attractions in Florida, and the long banyan trees on the grounds are a Bonita signature. Hurricane Donna landed on Southwest Florida on September 10, 1960, and Hurricane Ian came ashore on September 28, 2022; the two storms are the defining storms of the modern Bonita era, and the city has rebuilt after both. Lovers Key, the four-barrier-island chain just north of Bonita Beach, was preserved as a Florida state park in 1983 after being saved from luxury condominium development. Barefoot Beach Preserve, just south of the city line in Collier County, runs two miles of natural Gulf shoreline north of Wiggins Pass under the Saylor Trail boardwalk. The City of Bonita Springs received the Preserve America Community designation in 2012.
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.
