What Was Here Before: Cape Coral

The ground beneath Cape Coral has carried many names. For roughly two thousand years, this peninsula on the north bank of the Caloosahatchee River was Calusa territory. The Calusa were master mariners and fishers, paddling dugout canoes large enough to carry fifty people, building shell mounds that still dot southwest Florida. Spanish contact brought disease and slave raids, and by seventeen sixty-three the Calusa were largely gone.

For the next two centuries the land sat as scrub, mangrove, and palmetto, grazed by cattle, alive with alligators and Florida panthers. Then in nineteen fifty-seven, Baltimore brothers Jack and Leonard Rosen paid six hundred seventy-eight thousand dollars for one hundred three square miles of it. Workers sleeping in tents hacked through mangroves and ran industrial dredges for five years straight, carving four hundred miles of canals to raise the ground high enough to pass a septic-tank inspection. What they created was the largest planned community in the United States, marketed door to door to northern retirees sight unseen. Federal regulators eventually forced the Rosens to offer refunds. The water is real, the canals permanent, and Cape Coral today is home to nearly two hundred thousand people on land the Calusa once fished.