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.
The Caloosahatchee is the spine of all of it — the river that carried Edison's boat upstream and still defines the downtown edge, running west to San Carlos Bay and the Gulf. Around the city the subtropical landscape is its own draw: the manatees that gather in the warm water at Manatee Park each winter, the elevated boardwalks of the Six Mile Cypress Slough, and the lakes and gardens of Lakes Park, with the barrier islands just offshore. It is a working subtropical city wrapped around a historic core — the kind of place where a riverside laboratory and a cypress swamp sit a few miles apart.
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.
