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.
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.
