Between September of 2022 and 2024, local historian Gerri Reaves wrote a weekly column for The River Weekly News. Most of her articles traced the occupancy of Fort Myers’ historic buildings. She shared some of those stories last week with members of the Southwest Florida Historical Society during a presentation she titled “Scenes from Downtown History.”
“The first two slides I’m going to show are ones that are special to me,” said Reaves during the presentation, which was held at the Collaboratory on March 13. “One is because, as far as I know, the oldest known photo that’s in the historical society archives.”
Reaves’ articles were based on meticulous research of those archives, as well as images from Florida Memory and a number of private sources, including early photographs heirs periodically discover in attics, closets and desk drawers. Fort Myers’ oldest surviving photo is a case in point.
“This was taken by E. M. Williams,” Reaves told the audience. “He was a druggist. You usually find in history that it’s the drugstore that has the chemicals and so on that can produce photos in a time when people didn’t have their own cameras.”
The Williams photo dates back to the 1870s. As a result of her familiarity with the town’s early history, Reaves immediately noticed that the photo includes the town’s original 1854 dock that was built by the soldiers who established the old fort in 1850.
Observations like that prompted several audience members to ask whether Reaves’ River Weekly articles have been preserved for posterity. While she said that many can be found in three-ring binders at the Southwest Florida Historical Society or in the University of Florida Digital Archives, neither is complete or indexed for historical research.
“The only complete, comprehensive collection is in my computer files because The Island Sun and River Weekly’s website is no longer operational,” said Reaves.
Reaves has previously written two books on Fort Myers history for Arcadia Publishing. But she is not inclined to write a third. If she writes anything, it will be a play or serial that blends historical fact and fiction from Fort Myers’ early days. But at the audience’s urging, she is now considering how to preserve and index her copious research so that it is available to future historians.
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Reaves has been researching and writing about Fort Myers history for more than 20 years.
In addition to her “Now and Then” articles in the River Weekly News, she authored three books, including “Fort Myers: Then & Now” and “Legendary Locals of Fort Myers,” both available through Arcadia Publishing.
Reaves is a past president of the Southwest Florida Historical Society and a former employee of the Southwest Florida Museum of History.
The dock in the Williams photo was originally built by federal soldiers when they established the Seminole War fort between 1850 and 1856 at the direction of Major General David Emmanuel Twiggs. The pier and wharf were destroyed by a hurricane that ravaged the region in September of 1878. The townspeople replaced it with a span that lasted well into the 20th century.
The Williams photo is likely the only of that pier that is still extant today.
Another old photo that Reaves discussed during her presentation depicts Fort Myers' most historic building, a structure that was originally built in the 1850s to house the fort’s commanding officers. In the 1850s, it was occupied by Captain Winfield Scott Hancock and his wife, Almira. After Manuel Gonzalez and his party arrived on the grounds of the old fort in February of 1866, he and his 5-year-old converted the commanding officer’s quarters into an 8-room home with a fireplace for Evalina and the rest of the Gonzalez brood. When they vacated the property in 1873, Captain Francis Asbury Hendry’s father-in-law, Louis Lanier, and his wife moved into the house, followed by James E. Hendry Sr., R. Ingram O. Travers, and finally Harvie and Florida Heitman.
After Heitman's untimely death in 1922, Florida built a home west of town. The Heitman house was then picked up and moved to the back of the lot to make way for a 12-story hotel, but those plans were abandoned when the Florida land boom came to an abrupt end in 1926.
During her presentation, Reaves shared a photo that shows the house at the rear of the Heitman property.
“So what happened is the old staff headquarters was moved back and it became a library,” Reaves pointed out. “And you can see just how far this dock extends over the river. This is almost like a shopping center. It had so many different businesses, and you can see in addition to the Hendry Street dock the packing plant at the end of Monroe [the Lee County Packing Plant] up in the [left hand] corner there. You can see that this was a thriving, working waterfront. It wasn’t just marine businesses. There were steamship lines that you could hop on and get anywhere in the world with connections. But it also had things like laundry, pressing shops, photo studios, a Coca Cola plant, taxidermists, cigar manufacturing plants. There were all kinds of businesses located on the City Dock at one time or another.
"It was also, prior to 1913, integrated. There was at least one Black-owned business there.”
Among the other historic photos that Reaves included in her presentation were slides of Aaron Frierson’s home on the southeast corner of First and Jackson (the “Indian Fort Building” whose walls were made of 12 inches of concrete to deter termites), the Stone Block Building on the southwest corner of First and Hendry that was once site of First National Bank on the ground floor and the Leon Hotel upstairs, and Tonnelier Court, which was renamed Patio de Leon after it was purchased by George Sims.
Throughout the presentation, Reaves demonstrated what many in the audience already knew – not only does Reaves have at her fingertips a tremendous amount of knowledge about Fort Myers’ early history, but also she is able track the use and ownership of the town’s historic structures from the time they were constructed to the present day.
On the subject of preserving her articles and underlying research, Reaves said in an email, “I sometimes think what a mess it will be if I just donate a bunch of computer files and notebooks I've assembled. They will just present an onerous task for any person/organization wanting to incorporate them into an archive and make them accessible. I've seen that happen at the Historical Society, and I don't want to be yet another deceased member dumping boxes of stuff on the already crowded research center.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.