Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Lee County, Florida

Photograph: Banyan Tree, Fort Myers.jpg by J. Miers - User: (WT-shared) Jtesla16 at wts wikivoyage · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Lee County attraction

Edison and Ford Winter Estates

Lee County · Gulf Coast

Twenty-one acres at 2350 McGregor Boulevard in Fort Myers holding two winter homes, a laboratory, a museum and a botanical garden.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Thomas Edison first came here in 1885 on medical advice, bought riverfront land and had his house finished in 1886. He used it every winter until his death in 1931. Henry Ford bought the property next door, called The Mangoes and built in 1911 by Robert Smith, in 1916, so the two men were neighbors for fifteen years. The banyan tree by the entrance was planted in the middle of the 1920s and now spreads about four hundred feet around. In 1927 Edison formed the Edison Botanic Research Corporation with Ford and Harvey Firestone to find a domestic source of rubber; the laboratory went up in 1928, more than seventeen thousand plant samples were tested in it, and the answer turned out to be goldenrod, Solidago leavenworthii. The gardens hold over seventeen hundred plants of some eight hundred and ninety species, many of them brought back from Edison's collecting trips. The Ford house was listed on the National Register in September 1988 and the Edison house in August 1991. The site has been open to the public since 1947 and takes more than two hundred thousand visitors a year

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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