85 YEARS YOUNG
THE SHORT COLORFUL HISTORY OF LEE COUNTY
BY ROGER WILLIAMS rwilliams@floridaweekly.com

Inset: Lee E County was named for Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. Photos left to right: Thomas A. Edison, John Burroughs and Henry Ford lived on McGregor Boulevard, First Street as it looked 50 years ago and a Seminole indian in Lee County waters.

Caught in the blink of a proverbial eye, contained in the breath of a single long life, preserved in the still-warm amber of the 20th century, with a few runt years of the 21st century thrown in to boot, lies the modern history of Lee County.

Here as much as anywhere, perhaps, "the past is never dead. It's not even past," as William Faulkner wrote in his novel, "Requiem for a Nun."

But it's hard to see that truth in the motion and expansion of a place where cows outnumbered people probably until the 1980s - unless you look just under the surface.

Beginning today, Florida Weekly celebrates what we were and are as a contemporary county sliced a mere 85 years ago from the original Lee, which stretched at one time as far east as Lake Okeechobee, and as far south as Marco Island and Everglades City.

When that original county was formed from Monroe County in 1885, about 300 people lived in or near Fort Myers. But in 1923, when separate counties were cast of Hendry and Collier and a new, trimmed-down Lee County was shaped out of 804 square miles of land, and about 408 square miles of water, everything changed.

"When I came here that year from Massachusetts," says Barbara B. Mann, speaking from her home on W. Riverside Drive last week, "I was 10 years old.

There were no bridges. You got here either by boat or by train. We got here by train, and I think there were about 5,000 people in the area."

Thomas and Mina Edison, and Clara and Henry Ford (who declared, "history is more or less bunk,") were comfortably ensconced as neighbors in their riverfront winter retreats on McGregor Boulevard, just down the street from the Royal Palm Hotel, which had been built on the river 110 years ago, in 1898.

But urbanity, ease and the cosmopolitan lifestyle were in little evidence across most of the county. There, the cowboy culture remained as prevalent as it did in places like Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, except on the beaches and islands, where tough, sea-wise fishing families made their livings.

Within a year of Mann's arrival and the County's contemporary creation, workers completed a Tamiami Trail bridge over the Caloosahatchee, an event which gave rise to the first real estate boom, spawning such subdivisions as Edison Park, Dean Park and Russell Park, all hugging the river and all threaded brightly into the fabric of the new Lee.

In the eyes of some - Harry "Hank" Hendry, for example, a lawyer and the great great grandson of cattle magnate Capt. Francis A. Hendry - that was the beginning of the end.

"Building the first bridge across the Caloosahatchee was probably the greatest planning error the county commissioners ever made," he says. "Certainly today we have a decent airport, first class medical facilities, a variety of restaurants and cultural amenities like Barbara Mann Hall that were totally absent in the 1950s and '60s, but the quality of life, the water, the beaches, the fishing, the hunting, the green spaces have been lost and replaced by concrete."

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL MUSEUM AND THE FLORIDA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION

It's a sobering judgment that would have been unimaginable to those who began to build the brawling, sprawling new Lee County.

Capt. Page

In the same year they built the Fort Myers bridge, 1924, the county bought 160 acres of land that would become Page Field, named for World War I flying ace Capt. Richard Channing Moore Page.

In 1917, when Barbara B. Mann was still a Massachusetts Yankee, Page walked 10 miles from his home into Fort Myers to join the Army, and was rejected for a physical problem. So he traveled to Memphis, where he was also rejected. Undaunted, no doubt like many Lee County citizens of the time, he carried on to Washington D.C., where he convinced Florida's U.S. senators to grant him an exception, and get him into the Army Air Corps - he was the first Floridian to become an officer.

Page won the Distinguished Service Cross by shooting down three German planes and possibly two more, and he even survived the war. But his luck and determination ran out on Oct. 2, 1920, when he crashed his Curtis Sea-Gull into the Everglades near Everglades City. He was flying the county's tax collector and a mechanic around the remote stretches of what was then Lee County; none of them survived, according to a history of Lee County aviation by Prudy Taylor Board.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL MUSEUM AND THE FLORIDA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION Franklin Hardware on First Street in downtown Fort Myers in the early years. Below, the Tamiami Trail bridge across the Caloosahatchee River was completed in 1924.

Rugged reality

The 1920s reflected another reality, too, besides the rugged, can-do attitudes of a fiercely independent people - a reality less frequently mentioned in histories of Lee County: the heavy cross of racism.

In 1926, two black boys from the Safety Hill section of Dunbar were spotted swimming in a farm pond with a white girl from Dean Park; they were friends, and their neighborhoods - one all-white and the other all-black - were separated by about 100 yards.

Both boys were run down the next day by a mob, even though news accounts of the time indicate the girl tried to defend them as innocents. They were shot and dragged behind a car through town, then hung from a tree, their bodies left on public display. Although there were many witnesses, some who survive to this day, no one was ever charged with a crime.

Far to the east in Lee, and in the next year - 1927, when Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic - a white farming family built Charleston Park, the all-black community created to house farm workers that remains on site, a mile or so shy of the Hendry County line and flanked by up-for-sale orange groves.

Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, would later spend significant amounts of time in Lee County with Jim and Ellie Newton - he developed Edison Park, famously commissioning the sculpture of a naked woman to be placed at the front gate across from the Edison's home, before being pressured by Mina Edison to have the artist clothe it.

Opening the gates

But there are other anniversaries, too, besides our 85th birthday this spring - anniversaries or institutions that might be cited as key gate openers to the contemporary world we know.

William "Wild Bill" Belvin, right, as he emerges in 1930 from the wilderness that is now Cape Coral after spending a year living off the land. Belvin was reportedly paid for the stunt by the local newspaper, The Tropical News.

For decades, for example, Fort Myers had the only hospital within a hundred miles. That's why the Carolina-born parents of retired lawyer Tom Smoot, the author of a well-received 2004 biography published by the Pineapple Press, "The Edisons of Fort Myers: Discoveries of the Heart," hustled up from Everglades City just in time for his mom to give birth to him in a hospital in 1934, he has recalled. So Smoot, whose father eventually owned and operated a fish house on the river where the Uncommon Friends statue now stands downtown (and whose son, Tom Smoot, III, now practices law downtown), often refers to himself not simply as a Lee County native, but more broadly, as "a Gator through and through."

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL MUSEUM AND THE FLORIDA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION

During those hard years of the Great Depression, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began constructing the nowfamous locks on the Caloosahatchee, connecting it both to the Gulf and to the Atlantic, while putting up a dike around Lake Okeechobee to protect downriver citizens from any future hurricane-borne floods (the hurricane of 1928 killed thousands just east of Lee, when the lake overflowed).

The north side of the river remained as wild as anyplace in Florida, which is why, in 1930, a character named William "Wild Bill" Belvin could make a bet that he could be dropped into the wilderness naked and survive for a year.

He did, in the wilds of what is now Cape Coral, eating fish, shell-fish, wild fruits and greens, and small game, and making his clothes from both flora and fauna. He emerged 12 months later weighing 10 pounds more than he had when he'd started, according to accounts of the time.

The war

Perhaps the war created the modern Lee County - the big one, World War II, now 67 years distant from the arrival, in April of 1942, of the first of 60,000 men who would train in gunnery at Buckingham Army Airfield.

LEE COUNTY TIMELINE

"The population of Lee County still had not climbed above about 10,000," notes Victor Zarick, a historian and educator at the Fort Myers Historical Museum, "and it gave a huge boost to the local economy. Anything you had that you wanted to sell, any service you could provide, you did. It even saved the Royal Palm Hotel for a bit longer, so the war changed the whole economy."

It changed not only the economy of the time, but of the future, Zarick adds, since many GIs who first saw the subtropics in Lee County returned to buy homes and either work or retire here, in later years.

Meanwhile, nearby at Page Field and cloaked in secrecy, the future Gen. Jimmy Doolittle trained in stripped-down B-25s to take off a short runway similar in length to a carrier deck, before making the first raid on Japan, bombing Tokyo in April of 1942.

Although there were periodic and regular accidents on or near the airfields during the war years, the biggest danger was probably mosquito-born malaria, which is why historian Zarick suspects that "DDT, our old nemesis, was first used in the South domestically, including here, rather than in the Pacific as is generally thought. Malaria was putting more men in bed than injuries and all other factors, and DDT was the answer."

And it stayed the answer for a long time to come.

Debugging

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of an event many define as a 10 on the Richter scale of change in Lee County - the decision by county officials to hire T. Wayne Miller to make war on mosquitoes, forming Mosquito Control, in 1958. Before Miller built up the Mosquito Control air force of old propeller-driven planes (DC-3s) and Vietnam-era used helicopters that have long characterized the $10 million or more per-year operation, he used trucks spraying DDT all over Lee County.

Prior to that, there were stories of mosquitoes so thick that, for example, some cattlemen reported instances of cows being suffocated by clouds of mosquitoes that clogged their nostrils - not a farfetched story to old timers.

"All of us did this, we all used to run behind the DDT trucks in the spray or the mist," recalls John Yeomans, a retired barber and former high school history teacher, whose father was also a barber in Fort Myers. "We thought nothing of it."

Along with mosquito control came two other coincidental forces of nature, so to speak: the Rosen brothers, who founded Cape Coral and began selling lots and homes there in about 1958, and air conditioning, which became widely available about the time John F. Kennedy was elected president, in 1960.

"My father would have said that Mosquito Control was a defining moment in our history," remarks Hank Hendry, who almost never goes to work without a good dog by his side, these days a chocolate lab he walks at noon each workday.

There's a historic reason for the dog, of course, and a story, which suggests how the fabric of events now mostly invisible in our past is sewn into the thinking of people now shaping the present and future.

Hendry's great great grandfather, the pioneer cattleman F.A. Hendry, first fought in the third and bloody Seminole war here as a very young man, in the 1850s.

"He was a scout," Hank Hendry recalls, "and Fort Thompson was abandoned, so he led a detachment of troops to occupy it. He was walking around the grounds outside of the wall one day, and unarmed, when he walked upon a Seminole Indian, who was armed, and who drew down on him. But suddenly the Indian ran. Years later he met that Indian, who told him that he'd intended to kill (Hendry), but he heard a dog barking inside the Fort. And he knew that if the soldiers let dogs loose, he could be tracked back to his camp. So we've always been partial to dogs."

Growing up

The 1960s brought the final push to begin desegregating Lee County Schools, after officials had simply ignored federal court orders to do so, which was also the first time Veronica Shoemaker, a black candidate born and raised in Dunbar, ran for the Fort Myers city council and lost. (She later served 25 years on the council, from 1982 to just last April.)

And in 1965, Developer George Sanders, who used to brag that he would buy land by the acre and sell it by the square foot, opened the Edison Mall on land he'd hunted as a boy, like a lot of others. That created the first sprawl, and the first move away from a vital downtown in old Fort Myers, according to many business people and residents who watched the changes - and it also created a then-new and formidable partnership of sorts.

"This mall was the first shopping center in the United States to contain stores of both retail giants - Sears Roebuck and J.C. Penny, who had always been rivals," recalls John Tillis, who was mall president in the early 1970s.

And it was in the 1970s, exactly 30 years ago, when construction on I-75 finally reached as far south as Estero, irrevocably hooking up Lee County with the American Midwest.

"That as much as anything changed us in my mind," says Zarick - especially since it lent the county a distinctly Midwestern flavor, as hordes of people began to relocate here from Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and other Midwestern states.

But I-75 was quickly eclipsed as the greatest transportation marvel in Lee County by 1982 or shortly after, when both the airports that thrived during World War II - Page Field and Buckingham Army Airfield - traded their roles at center stage for a spot in the wings, bowing to what is now Southwest Florida International Airport.

Zarick and his wife flew into that airport one day in 1984, when almost no one was there. "It was early morning, and we sat there and watched F-14s dive-bomb the airport, the runways, for practice. That's how empty it was. We looked at each other, and we looked around, and there were all of about 5 or 6 couples in the airport."

Not anymore. Whether a boom or bust economy, the county broke through the 1990s and into the 21st century with a population of almost 441,000, the Census Bureau reports - and that's increased now to about 630,000.

And the scrappy, hard-working immigrants keep arriving, just like once upon a time in Lee: Between 2000 and 2004, the county experienced the fastest growth rate of a Hispanic population in the United States.

And Barbara B. Mann sees no downside to any of it, she says. "I don't see a negative. What I like most about it, of course, is the growth in culture." Today

So what are we now, as a product of all that history? A county with professional baseball (the Boston Red Sox and Minnesota Twins spring training homes) and philharmonic Bach (the Southwest Florida Symphony, Gulf Coast Symphony and others); a county with 47 public elementary schools, 21 middle schools, and 13 public high schools, and a public education budget of about $1.66 billion; a county with state of the art medical care, with superhighways and international airports and a variety of bridges to connect both islands and riverbank opposites; and finally, a county with a future.

And perhaps a county that can retain some of its small-town flavor.

"It's systemic, with the growth community, that you lose some of the sense of camaraderie, the sense of companionship," says Bruce Strayhorn, a lawyer born and raised in a family of cattlemen, judges and lawyers. "Once you could go into the Snack House restaurant (downtown, now gone), and if you didn't know everybody you'd know about three-quarters. When you started a conversation, you didn't say, 'How are you,' you might say, 'How was that doctor's appointment for your heart?'

"What I miss in our larger transient community is the sense of camaraderie. I hope we can maintain that, to some degree at least."

If that sense of camaraderie is not yet gone, and if history is a past that isn't dead or even past, as Faulkner said, then history must also be a future that isn't dead, either - something inevitable, perhaps, that has not yet come to pass.

It is that future history to which Smart Growth Director Wayne Daltry, born and raised in Bradenton and who arrived here in 1975 when "this was still just a little field town," has given the most thought. A history of what is to come rather than what has come.

"I'd like this place to have reinvented itself a bit," he says, thinking of a point in time somewhere mid-century. "I believe in the urban or suburban form, if you will. You have your many small centers, and you mix the uses with shopping, working and housing, housing for young people starting out who don't need 2,500 square feet, above the stores. Kind of like downtown in Fort Myers between Jackson and Hendry streets, along First Street.

"I'm the guy looking at energy stuff, at the national debt, at climate change - so (the small centers) are where the greater part of the American population is going to have to move to or reconstruct, and we have a large part of the pattern in place, already. You don't use as much energy - you pour yourself a cold drink and sit in a hammock. And we have to make ourselves resilient to storm damage. It's something we once knew and forgot, and it will become more frequent with climate change.

"And if we adapt, then we'll be the place people want to be in their golden years."

Then future historians can call them, and us, preservationists, or restorationists, or even adaptionists.