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 is the City of Palms — a Seminole-War fort on the Caloosahatchee that grew, beneath a corridor of royal palms, into Southwest Florida's great river town. Our Fort Myers designs gather that into wearable form. Wear the City of Palms. Wear the river and the royal-palm road.
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.
