Fort Myers began as a fort. In 1850, during the Third Seminole War, the U.S. Army built a post on the south bank of the Caloosahatchee and named it for Colonel Abraham Myers. The land had been Calusa for thousands of years, and Seminole after that; the fort was part of the long, hard federal campaign to remove them. The garrison came and went — it served as a Union outpost and saw one of the southernmost land actions of the Civil War — and was finally abandoned. In 1866 the first civilian settlers moved into the empty buildings and started a town; they kept the old fort's name, and Fort Myers it stayed.
It stayed small and agricultural — cattle and citrus — until the winter of 1885, when Thomas Edison sailed up the Caloosahatchee, liked what he saw, and built a winter home he called Seminole Lodge. He spent decades wintering there, experimenting with plants and rubber in a riverside laboratory, and eventually talked his friend Henry Ford into buying the bungalow next door, The Mangoes. Their side-by-side estates on McGregor Boulevard turned a quiet river town into one of America's most famous winter colonies, and the Edison and Ford Winter Estates remain Southwest Florida's premier historic attraction — twenty-one acres of gardens and one of the largest banyan trees in the country.
Why People Visit Fort Myers
Fort Myers rewards travelers who want history, gardens, and the river rather than only a beach — the inventors' winter estates, the royal-palm boulevard, and a revived downtown on the Caloosahatchee. People come for the Edison and Ford estates and the City-of-Palms streetscape, for the manatees and cypress boardwalks, and for an easygoing Southwest Florida day where Gilded-Age history and subtropical nature sit side by side.
