Edison and Ford on the Caloosahatchee

In eighteen eighty-five, Thomas Edison was exhausted. He had just wired much of New York City with electric light. He was sick, stressed, and his doctor told him to go somewhere warm and rest. Edison took a steamboat south to Fort Myers, Florida, which at the time had fewer than five hundred residents and no railroad. He bought fourteen acres along the Caloosahatchee River and began building two prefabricated cottages, shipped down from Maine in sections.

He called the place Seminole Lodge, and he spent forty winters there before he died in nineteen thirty-one. He brought his second wife Mina, their children, and eventually some of the most powerful men in America. The estate became what one historian called the most visited private home in America during the nineteen twenties.

Henry Ford first came to visit in nineteen fourteen and fell completely in love with the place. By nineteen sixteen he had purchased the Craftsman bungalow next door and named it The Mangoes. Only a wooden gate, which both families called the Friendship Gate, separated the two properties. Ford made it a point to be in Fort Myers every February eleventh for Edison's birthday. Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate, visited regularly. Here on the Caloosahatchee, three of the most consequential industrialists in American history spent their winters in adjacent houses, eating Mina Edison's dinners and debating the future.

Their collaboration produced something remarkable. Worried that foreign sources supplied nearly all of America's rubber, Edison, Ford, and Firestone each contributed twenty-five thousand dollars in nineteen twenty-seven to fund the Edison Botanic Research Corporation. A laboratory was built on this property in nineteen twenty-eight. Edison tested more than seventeen thousand plant samples, searching for something that could grow fast in American soil and produce usable rubber. He settled on goldenrod. Edison managed to breed a goldenrod variety fourteen feet tall with a rubber yield of twelve percent. The project was ambitious but never scaled. When synthetic rubber proved more practical during World War Two, the goldenrod program was quietly put aside.

What remains is twenty-one acres of botanical gardens, Edison's laboratory exactly as he left it, Ford's bungalow next door, and the banyan tree Edison planted as a seedling in eighteen ninety-five, now sprawling across more than four hundred feet of ground. Edison often said he chose Fort Myers not for the weather but for the river. Looking at it today, it is hard to argue with the choice.