Koreshan Unity: The Hollow Earth Utopia of Estero
Near Fort Myers, Florida
In eighteen ninety-four, a Chicago physician named Cyrus Teed led about two hundred followers into the Florida frontier and founded one of the strangest utopian colonies in American history. Teed called himself Koresh, the Hebrew version of his name, and preached a cosmology he called Koreshanity. The central belief: the earth is hollow and we live on the inside of a sphere, with the sun, moon, and stars suspended at the center.
The community that grew along the Estero River was genuinely impressive by frontier standards. They built a bakery, a printing press, their own power plant, and a World College of Life, providing electricity to surrounding towns years before the technology reached most of the region. At its peak, around nineteen oh five, about two hundred fifty people called it home. Teed died in nineteen oh eight, two years after a Fort Myers marshal beat him in a street fight. But the colony held on without him for another half century, the last four members finally deeding the land to Florida in nineteen sixty-one. It is now a state park, and several of the original buildings still stand where the believers in the hollow earth built them.
