What Was Here Before: Lehigh Acres

Before a single house lot was platted here, this corner of Lee County, Florida was Calusa fishing ground for nearly two thousand years. By the mid-seventeen hundreds, epidemic disease and slave raids had ended the Calusa presence. Seminoles moved through in the eighteen hundreds during three wars with the United States, but this inland scrubland was marginal country, ranched for cattle and little else.

In nineteen fifty-four, Chicago businessman Lee Ratner bought eighteen thousand acres and called it Lucky Lee Ranch. He soon teamed with developers who saw something more profitable than cattle, and the ranch became Lehigh Acres. Their pitch was simple: buy a piece of Florida before prices climb. Lots sold by mail and at free steak dinners to northerners who never saw the land. There were no sidewalks, no water mains, no sewers, just a grid of graded roads and a deed. At its most expansive, Lehigh Acres was platted into a vast number of small lots. The two thousand eight housing crash hit it catastrophically. Today it is one of the fastest-growing areas in Florida, finally filling in the ghost grid after seventy years.