General Williams, Walter Haldeman, and the Plan of Naples
Near Naples, Florida
The town of Naples was conceived in eighteen eighty-five when a Kentucky senator named General John Stuart Williams recruited a Louisville newspaper publisher named Walter Haldeman for a coastal adventure. Williams had traveled the southwest Florida coast and returned convinced that a settlement could be built there. Haldeman was the owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a man with capital and ambition.
The two men sailed to the site together, liked what they saw, and began the legal and financial process of creating a town. In eighteen eighty-seven, the Naples Town Improvement Company was recorded in Lee County's plat books, incorporating plans for a town of numbered streets and named avenues on about three thousand seven hundred acres of land that the company purchased from Hamilton Disston, the Philadelphia businessman who had acquired an enormous tract of Florida land from the state just a few years before. By the summer of eighteen eighty-eight, the new town had a hotel with twenty rooms and six cottages, a general store, a post office, and a pier six hundred feet long reaching into the Gulf.
The pier was everything: because no roads led to Naples, boats delivered all supplies and all visitors. The Naples Company struggled financially through the late eighteen eighties, burdened by the lack of railroad service. In eighteen ninety, the company auctioned its pier, hotel, and undeveloped land to Haldeman for fifty thousand dollars.
He owned the town, and for the next several decades Naples was essentially Haldeman's private winter retreat, accessible by invitation and by boat.
