GoJoe: Edison-Ford Winter Estates

So you’re toiling away in your New Jersey laboratory inventing light bulbs and phonographs and motion pictures, etc. All this productivity has left you with plenty of cash and you think, “Hey, I don’t have to spend the winters in cold weather anymore!”

Apparently that's just what Thomas Edison was thinking when he arrived in Fort Myers in 1885. He bought twenty acres, part of a former cattle ranch fronting on the wide Caloosahatchee River, and set about building his own tropical paradise, naming it Seminole Lodge. Edison and his family spent winters there for the rest of his life - over forty years. They built two rambling houses, various out buildings and laboratories, and transformed the barren ranch land with lush landscaping dotted with palm and banyan trees.

In 1915, Edison’s close friend and fellow innovator Henry Ford bought the property next door, and the Edisons and Fords shared their winters in this tropical retreat. In the late 1920s up to the time of his death in 1931, Edison spent much of his time in Fort Myers looking for new sources of rubber. Crude rubber had to be imported and was becoming increasingly expensive. At the behest of Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone, Edison investigated thousands of plants and trees seeking new sources of latex, the sap from which natural rubber is refined. At one point, Firestone presented Edison with a small banyan tree he'd brought back from India. The hope was that banyans would produce plentiful latex. Edison planted the tree at Seminole Lodge. Today it covers almost an acre and is the third largest known banyan in the world. It was the first banyan tree planted in the U.S.

We spent a morning strolling through the garden-like grounds and peering through windows and doors into the Edison houses and "The Mangoes," the Ford home.

One of the two Edison homes ...