Francis Hendry: Cattle King and Father of Fort Myers

In eighteen seventy, a man named Francis Asbury Hendry drove twelve thousand head of cattle from the Peace River down through palmetto scrub and sawgrass and mosquito swarms to Fort Myers. He had done it before, but this time he was staying. Hendry was thirty-seven years old, a veteran of the Third Seminole War and the Confederate Army, and he was already one of the most powerful cattlemen in Florida. He was about to become the most powerful man in southwest Florida.

By eighteen seventy-six, Hendry had fenced twenty-five thousand acres of range land along the Caloosahatchee and owned roughly fifty thousand head of cattle. The number is almost impossible to picture. It made him a kind of feudal lord over what was then open country running from the river to Lake Okeechobee.

He was also a builder. On August twelfth, eighteen eighty-five, Hendry chaired the meeting at the Fort Myers schoolhouse where local voters agreed to incorporate the town. He served on the first city council. In eighteen eighty-seven, he persuaded the Florida Legislature to create Lee County out of the southern portion of Monroe County, and he lobbied personally for the county to be named for Robert E. Lee, a man he had served under and admired.

He also founded the town of LaBelle, east of here, named for two of his daughters, Laura and Belle. He served in the Florida State Legislature. He built churches, supported schools, and funded roads when roads in this part of Florida were simply suggestions.

Hendry died in nineteen seventeen at eighty-three years old. He had come to Fort Myers when it was three dozen settlers and a rotting military wharf. He left it with a courthouse, a railroad, and a future. The county that bears his hero's name is itself a monument to his ambitions and his contradictions.