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.
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.
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.
