The Royal Palm Hotel opened in 1898, the railroad reached town in 1904, and Fort Myers grew into the seat of Lee County. Downtown filled in along First Street — the brick storefronts, the 1908 Arcade Theatre, the old bank buildings — the district now revived and known as the River District. The royal palms Edison started spread up McGregor and through the historic neighborhoods of Edison Park and Dean Park, and the City of Palms settled into its place on the Southwest Florida coast. By the 1920s the Tamiami Trail had bridged the river and opened the road south, and the winter crowds kept coming for the climate Edison had advertised to the world.
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.
