We began the day with donuts at Bennets - a 5-star donut shop in Fort Myers. Great flavors - I had the peanut butter while Gary had the Orange Coconut and the Maple Walnut Crunch. The taste was - ummm - but the grease was too much. I realize that donuts are fried in grease but usually it’s not dripping off the donuts. I think that they need to wrap their donuts in paper towels before they serve them. Would I go back? I’d have to think about that. As you can see from the picture I took at 10:00, they had done bonkers business this morning.
But our main goal of the day was the Edison-Ford summer residences just 1.6 miles down the road on the Caloosahatchee River. These were the homes that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built next to each other down here. It started a year after Edison’s wife died and he didn’t want to spend another winter in cold New Jersey. He visited the area in 1885 - not easy in that day and age since the train didn’t come to Fort Myers until 1904 and good roads were not available until after 1910. They took a ship all the way around the Florida coast, landed where the Caloosahatchee River met the Gulf and finished his trip by boat. He purchased 13 acres for $2,750 from a cattleman known as the ‘King of the Crackers’ (a breed of cattle in Florida), built a home for himself and one for his partner. One year later he married Mina and they spent part of their honeymoon here. He called his winter house ‘Seminole Lodge’ and he lived here until he died in 1931. Mina lived here until age 82 in 1947 when she deeded the house to the city of Fort Myers to preserve his legacy.
One of his employees, Henry Ford, attended a Detroit Edison Illuminating Company conference in 1896 and met Edison. During his spare time he tinkered with gas-powered engines. They became fast friends and Henry Ford visited Edison in 1914 for a camping trip to the Everglades. He liked the area so much and was such a good friend of Edison that he purchased the house next door, which he called ‘The Mangoes’ for all the mango trees in the yard, for $20,000 (which was the same price he sold it for in 1945) and joined Edison for the winters in Fort Myers.
The good friends often sat around discussing inventions and business and Harvey Firestone often joined them.
These 3, along with famous naturalist John Burroughs, also went for camping trips together, in Model T’s and Ford had outfitted one of his truck models with a big kitchen box that they could cook in.
We visited the 9 buildings on the property that were open, walked around the grounds and then toured the museum and a laboratory that Edison had built for his experiments into finding a domestic rubber source.
We were extremely happy to meet Tom and Mina as they strolled about their property. We even got to chat with them for a while.
We couldn’t enter the rooms in the houses, of course but the top half of the door is open with only a glass plane in the bottom half so we could see in completely. I was surprised that the Edison’s bedroom was separated from the main home by a covered walkway. Of course this is Florida and the weather is warm throughout the winter but I know that freezing temps occur here also. The porches sere covered by huge 8’ or more overhangs which also allowed the breezes to flow through. When you’re wearing black wool clothing, as the Edison’s and their friends did back in the late 19th C, that breeze must have been heavenly.
‘This house is a dream... and we are living in Fairyland,’ Edison's wife Mina wrote of the Florida retreat,
Here’s a picture of one of the rooms. Note all the windows on the front to give a great view of the river. The light is an ‘electrolier’ lighting fixture. There was a steam powered dynamo in a laboratory that generated direct current electricity for the house. When he property was first electrified in 1887, a local newspaper reported that all 349 residents of Fort Myers came to witness it.
In the bedroom at the far end of the bathroom is a ‘sauna’ a box with light bulbs inside. You could step inside, sit down and turn the light bulbs on for a warm sauna. It seems that Mina liked pink.
Here’s Ford’s home.
But, aside from his and Ford’s home, there is the banyan tree, probably the largest in the world. It began when he, Ford and Firestone realized that the US needed a domestic source for rubber and they built a lab on the property to try to find this. Edison brought in 1000’s of trees from all over the world to try to find one that would grow in the US, would grow fast and would provide enough latex from which to make the rubber for car tires.
One of his purchases was a banyan tree which he bought here in 1925 as a 4’ sapling. It wasn’t the answer to the rubber quandary but it grew to an acre in diameter and is the first sight you see as you approach the VC. This is all one tree, by the way.
Edison, of course, is associated with his inventions. We all know about electricity and the phonograph. But he held more than 1,000 United States patents, and he submitted patent paperwork for a record 65 consecutive years. Among his lesser known creations: the talking doll,
the electric train, alkaline batteries, a fruit preserver and a stencil pen, the grandfather of today's tattoo stylus.
After we toured the homes of both Ford and Edison we headed on over to the the 15,000 sq. ft museum which details his life and has many of his inventions for viewing. Here’s a high chair for a baby that turns into a small table and chair for an older child. And, check out the waffle iron.
And not to be missed are the entertainment artifacts: phonographs, movie projectors, nickelodeons and films. I liked the headlamp:
Edison was perhaps "green" before the word became fashionable. Some of his words on the subject are posted in the museum: "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that." Edison wrote that in 1931.
We toured the homes, the laboratory and the museum. Afterwards, we toured the community, natch, on our feet as we walked the neighborhood.
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