Advertisement
Published: January 14th 2012
Thomas Edison winter estate
The Edison Winter estate. He built it in a warehouse in New Jersey, shipped it to Florida, and reassembled it on site.Fort Myers
Busch Gardens wore me out, so I deliberately took a light day today.
I went to
Ft. Myers.
The town was founded as a cattle port trading with Havana, but it has since become a haven for retirees.
Given when I got in, the first place I went was lunch.
I had it at the Tropic Café, which is a classic lunch spot serving cheap American food.
The owners know the regulars by name, and the waitresses call people “honey”.
Given that it was midday on a workday, I was the youngest person there.
The food was pretty good, especially for the price.
After lunch, I explored downtown.
Ft. Myers calls itself the “
City of Palms”, and sure enough there were hundreds of them downtown.
All of them, it turns out, were deliberately planted.
The buildings are done in the
Mediterranean Revival style made famous by Florida architect
Addison Mizner.
Most of them were painted pastel colors.
Unusually, the streets were made of bricks.
The overall effect is that Ft. Myers looks like a junior version of
Palm Beach, which may be the point.
Downtown Ft. Myers.
Typical street in downtown Ft. Myers. Note the brick paving and Mediterranian architecture. All of the palm trees were planted in the early 1920s. Thomas Edison Winter Estate
Ft. Myers contains one major tourist attraction.
Thomas Edison perfected the light bulb just before he turned forty.
Soon afterward, he had a nervous breakdown.
His doctor recommended that he find a warm place to spend the winters so his constant work would kill his body less.
Edison originally went to Jacksonville.
He found it too cold for his liking, so he took a trip around Florida.
In the late 1800s, this was much harder than it is now.
He toured what he could reach by train, but did not see anything he liked.
He then chartered a boat to see the remainder of the west coast.
Eventually, he came into Ft. Myers.
The town at that point was a port for local cattle ranchers.
Florida in those days exported more beef than Texas!
Thomas Edison saw a piece of land along the riverfront, and decided he wanted it.
His reason was not the incredible view, or even the isolation, but the large amount of bamboo he saw growing on the shore.
He wanted the land to grow plants to use
Thomas Edison's banyan tree
Planted by Thomas Edison soon after he moved to his winter estate, this tree is now the largest in the state of Florida in his experiments!
The land ultimately became his
winter estate, where he spent every winter for the next four decades.
The estate today has three major parts.
The first is the Thomas Edison museum.
The museum goes over his life and has examples of the many things he invented.
It also describes the pressures he faced from his fame, and how those pressures ultimately caused him to move to Florida.
The history portion is much more extensive than the National Historic Site in New Jersey (see March 6
th), although it has less technical detail.
This museum has a working
wax cylinder phonograph, which a staffer will demonstrate periodically.
The second major part is Edison’s research garden.
He grew a large number of plants here, which he then processed to get chemicals for experiments.
His major project, which he was working on at the time of his death, was to find a substitute for latex in rubber.
To this end, he planted a number of
Banyan trees.
This tree, which is native to India, grows outward, dropping roots as it goes.
A mature tree looks like
Thomas Edison boat dock
This boat dock designed by Thomas Edison is over a century old, and it still stands. Edison knew engineering :) the best tree house on earth.
These trees have been growing since Edison planted them in the Florida heat, so one of them is now the
largest tree in the state.
The staff needs to prune it regularly so it doesn’t grow into the surrounding buildings.
The last major part is Edison’s house.
It’s a relatively simple wood frame house that he presented to his wife as an anniversary gift.
He did not have much time to build it.
He solved this problem in typical style.
He designed and built the house in a warehouse in New Jersey!
His workers then disassembled and numbered each piece, shipped it to Florida on a barge, and rebuilt it like a giant set of Lincoln’s Logs.
The house has very wide porches.
It was deliberately designed this way to cause breezes that cooled the rooms.
The house interior is not open for tours; instead people look in through various doors and windows.
A long pier sticks into the bay from the grounds in front of the house.
It was built by Edison so people could dock
Thomas Edison's private retreat
Edison often when "fishing" in order to think of new ideas. When he got one, he raced to this building to record it. boats.
Remember that this area was not reachable by road at the time.
He designed the pier very well.
It still stands after almost a century, surviving many hurricanes.
A small building lies next to the pier, which relates to Edison’s fishing stories.
Many Florida residents like to fish.
Edison was one of them.
People noticed that Edison never caught anything.
One of the servants finally noticed that Edison never caught anything because he never baited his lines.
He “fished” as an excuse to get away from social obligations and think.
When he came up with a new idea, he would race to the building next to the pier, where he had an office set up, and write it all down.
Henry Ford Winter Estate
Next door to Edison’s house is Henry Ford’s winter retreat.
Henry Ford joined the Detriot Edision Company as a young man.
He eventually got promoted to chief engineer.
He met Edison at a company dinner and showed him some ideas for an early automobile.
Edison pushed him to start making it, and provided advice on
Edison estate garden
A small part of of the Edison's formal garden running the company for years afterwards.
Ford never forgot this early support.
Every winter he would visit Edison in Ft. Myers for a week.
He ultimately decided it would be better to just build a house in the area.
The owner of the house next to Thomas Edison sniffed an opportunity, and took advantage of it.
He finally sold it to Henry Ford for $20,000, which was a lot of money in 1917.
Ford expanded the existing house and added a slate roof.
Like Edison, it’s comfortable but not ostentatious.
Unlike Edison, Ford never spent more than two weeks here at a time in his entire life.
Astute readers probably realize that Ft. Myers is the
spring training site of the Boston Red Sox, and I was there during the spring.
After much deliberation, I decided to skip a visit.
Hard-core fans know that the best days to see spring training are the days that games are NOT taking place.
The players are more relaxed, one sees what normally takes place behind the scenes, and there are many more opportunities for autographs.
It’s a much better experience.
Today,
Henry Ford's winter estate
Henry Ford's winter retreat, next door to Edison's estate. He bought an existing house and added to it. they had a game, and the tickets were already sold out.
I spent the night at the
Myakka River State Park campground.
Myakka River is one of Florida’s oldest and largest state parks, and a place most tourists have never heard of.
The campground is located in a grove of twisted old oak and palm trees with hanging Spanish moss.
It looks like paradise.
The staff does a very good job of enforcing the noise rules (the ban on alcohol certainly helps) so it was very quiet.
The one downside is that the sites are crammed together, so there is very little privacy.
It’s a small price to pay for the privilege of falling asleep to the cries of water birds.
Be warned, this place is close enough to paradise at this time of year, one may want to move in for a month.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.385s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 17; qc: 47; dbt: 0.2863s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
