Fort Harvie and the Seminole Wars: The Fort That Became a City
Near Fort Myers, Florida
The city of Fort Myers got its name from a military outpost that very nearly never existed. This stretch of the Caloosahatchee River was not a destination for American settlers in the eighteen forties. It was the edge of the known world, a place soldiers were sent when they were needed in Indian country.
The Second Seminole War drove American forces into this remote corner of Florida beginning in eighteen thirty-five. The Army first set up Fort Dulaney at Punta Rassa, at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee, but a hurricane in October of eighteen forty-one destroyed it. Soldiers moved upriver to higher ground and built a post they called Fort Harvie. The war wound down, Fort Harvie was abandoned, and the swamp took it back.
Then came the Paynes Creek incident of eighteen forty-nine, when Seminole warriors killed two trading post workers on the Peace River. That was enough to restart the Third Seminole War and send the Army south again. In eighteen fifty, Major David Twiggs ordered two companies of artillery to establish a new fort on the ashes of old Fort Harvie. The new post needed a name. They chose Fort Myers, after Colonel Abraham Myers, who served the Army's Quartermaster Department and happened to be in the vicinity. Myers would later resign his commission when Florida seceded and serve the Confederacy, which gave the fort an ironic legacy it has never quite shaken.
At its peak, Fort Myers was described as one of the finest and largest forts of the Seminole Wars. It covered about one hundred thirty-nine acres and had fifty-seven buildings, including a two-story blockhouse and a wharf stretching one thousand feet into the river. Supply ships from Tampa could dock here. For a moment it was a real installation.
The Third Seminole War ended in eighteen fifty-eight and the Army withdrew. The fort sat empty for years, its buildings rotting in the subtropical heat. But the wharf, the cleared land, the river access, those things stayed. When settlers drifted back after the Civil War, they found the bones of something already built. The fort became the foundation for the city that grew around it.
