PARKS & OUTDOORS
Koreshan State Park
Lee County · Gulf Coast
A hundred and thirty-five acres at US 41 and Corkscrew Road in Estero, preserving the settlement of a nineteenth century religious community.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Cyrus Teed was a physician from New York who, after what he described as a divine illumination at the age of thirty, took the name Koresh and began teaching a doctrine that included celibacy as the road to immortality, equality between men and women, and a cosmogony in which the earth is a hollow sphere and we live on the inside of it. In 1894 he bought three hundred and twenty acres here to build a New Jerusalem. Within nine years the settlement supported around two hundred people, and at its height the group held nearly seventy-five hundred acres and more than seventy buildings. About three in every four members were women, which was extraordinary for the period. Teed died on December 22, 1908, and his followers kept his body five days waiting for a resurrection. In 1961 the five remaining members deeded three hundred and five acres to the state. The last resident, Hedwig Michel, died in 1982. The settlement went on the National Register in May 1976. There are sixty campsites, four of them glamping units, and the Art Hall still hosts music
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