MUSEUM & CULTURE
LaBelle Heritage Museum
Hendry County · South Florida & the Keys
The museum of a cattle town named for two daughters of the man they called the Cattle King of South Florida.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
LaBelle is the seat of Hendry County, eighteen miles east of Fort Myers where State Roads 80 and 29 cross, on the Caloosahatchee River. Captain Francis Asbury Hendry, a Civil War veteran and rancher, named the place for his daughters Laura and Carrie Belle. He was called the Cattle King of South Florida and at his height ran 25,000 acres and 50,000 head. The first settlers here were Florida cracker cow hunters and game trappers on the western edge of his land. The town built its first school by 1891. Hendry subdivided his land for sale in 1909, Edgar Everett Goodno bought most of it and grew the town nearly twentyfold, and in May 1924 Henry Ford bought 7,000 acres from Goodno. LaBelle became the county seat in 1923 and was chartered as a city in 1925. The heritage museum keeps that story. Two buildings in town are in the National Register and worth looking at on the same trip: the Captain Hendry House of 1914 and the old Hendry County Courthouse of 1927, Mediterranean and Mission Revival with a 70-foot tower
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