Our Bonita Springs retro logo carries Florida's alligator and the date "1845" stamped beneath, for the year Florida became the 27th state of the Union. The black-and-white styling is retro, in the vocabulary of crate labels, mid-century beach signage, and the painted wooden roadside placards that once stood along Old 41 between the Liles Hotel and the Wonder Gardens. The alligator and the date do the work of placing the design in the founding generation of the state — and the city that grew up as a U.S. Army survey camp on a quiet southwest-flowing river, was rebranded by Tennessee investors in 1912, and has carried one of Florida's oldest roadside attractions through every decade since 1936.
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.
