Fort Myers, Florida ~ Thursday

Thursday, March 13, 2025

10-11:30am, Inside the Homes Tour, Edison & Ford Winter Estates, open 9am-4:30pm, $50

Lunch at Beans (Cuban and Colombian) à IMAG Science Center?, 10am-5pm, $20 OR Fort Meyers Murder Mystery à Fancy dinner out: Blanc in Fort Myers (OpenTable) @ 5:30pm

Thursday we spent in Fort Myers. On Dear Husband's mother's recommendation, we visited the Edison & Ford Winter Estates on the Caloosahatchee River. A guided walking tour let us go inside Thomas Edison's house and the one that Henry Ford used the handful of times he visited his mentor. We actually started at the Edison caretaker's house, an old lodging building for cattle hands. Eventually somebody's widow got the cattle path paved and named for her late husband (MacGregor).

This is the Edison main house, "Seminole Lodge," which was built in the 1880s and remodeled in 1906.

Above: the combo study / living room with electric lights and a phonograph; you can see the blue shoe booties we had to wear to protect the floors. Below: the swimming pool and the bathhouse that Ford built Mina after he took Edison's separate study (think: "inventor's hut") off to his museum of Americana in Michigan without asking her.

Above: in a tiny side room they acknowledge the Native people who land this was. I think the woman in the photograph was an early activist? Below: on the other side of the Edison Guest House [not shown]--which originally belonged to one of his business partners, until there was a falling out, and it changed hands several times until the Edisons bought it in 1906--is Ford's "more modern," prairie-style home. It used to be completely surrounded by fruit trees but now sports a tidy lawn.

After a quick ice cream snack from the gift shop, we toured the museum, which was WAY larger than I had anticipated. It definitely can't be appreciated on an empty stomach. Edison is famous for inventing or improving the telegraph, phonograph, lightbulb, and early moving pictures (kinetograph). He went on several highly publicized "camping" [glamping] trips with buddies. They have whole cases full of artefacts, and we watched some very early film clips. At the time of his death, his lab was trying to fashion a substitute for rubber from goldenrod.

We also learned about Lewis Latimer, an underappreciated Black engineer and inventor he worked with, as well as his powerhouse of a second wife, Mina, shown here in an oil portrait with her stuffed peacock. I didn't even take any photographs of the section about a baseball team (!?).

"I have not failed. I've found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas A. Edison / 1,093 U.S. Patents

Then we drove into downtown Fort Myers for a small, late lunch at a Colombian restaurant. We decided to spend a couple of quiet hours working at the public library before keeping our "fancy" dinner reservation (once we could find the restaurant). It was pretty good, but I had bought tickets to a two-man musical at the last minute and miscalculated the travel time we would need to get to the church that was serving as the theater. Oops. Luckily traffic had been bad for many people, so the performance had started late, and I think we only missed 1.5 numbers. Unlike certain shows I've been late for before (::cough:: Sixth Sense), we could figure out what was going on: one actor played a small-town detective, and the other actor played (and sang) 12 different suspects. It was delightful.

Day 5: K is for kayak