Hamilton Disston and the Land Deal That Created Southwest Florida

In eighteen eighty-one, a Philadelphia businessman named Hamilton Disston completed what was then reported as the largest purchase of land ever made by a single person, acquiring four million acres of Florida from the state government for one million dollars, or twenty-five cents per acre. The deal rescued Florida from bankruptcy. The state had accumulated enormous debt and had no way to service it; Disston's cash, negotiated in part through his friendship with Governor William Bloxham, kept the state government solvent.

Disston intended to drain the wetlands of southern Florida, making the submerged land farmable and therefore profitable. He organized the Atlantic Gulf Coast Canal and Okeechobee Land Company and cut canals to lower the water level of Lake Okeechobee, beginning the transformation of the Florida interior that would proceed, under different owners and ambitions, for the next century. He also sold land.

The major cities of Sarasota and Naples grew directly from land that Disston released to developers and settlers. The Naples Town Improvement Company acquired its original land from holdings that traced back to Disston's purchase, the foundation of the town that Walter Haldeman and General John Stuart Williams then platted and developed. Disston's grand vision for converting Florida's wetlands into productive farmland set in motion a pattern of large-scale drainage and development that defined southwest Florida's relationship with its landscape for more than a hundred years, creating the agricultural economy of the region and raising ecological questions that are still being answered in the Everglades restoration projects of the present day.