A day for old houses and old friends

The book ends of this day were historic old houses in Ft. Myers, Florida and old (as in long time) friends from Michigan.

A couple days ago Joan spotted an ad for the “Edison & Ford Winter Estates” in Ft. Myers, Florida. Like many members of my family, Joan loves touring historic old homes. We’ve done many all over the country, but this is one we hadn’t heard of until she saw the advertisement.

As the name implies the tour involved the winter estates of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, who along with being cooperating businessmen were good friends. It was a very interesting tour and we were fortunate to get tour guide “Ryan” who was as funny as he was informative and entertaining.

The tour started in the museum, which had many of the same artifacts as we have previously seen at Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. What was different here were the winter residences of the two families.

Thomas Edison purchased the property in 1885 and he and his family used it through 1947. Another home on the property, which initially was bought by an early business partner of Edison’s, Ezra Gillilland, was remodeled into a guest house after Ezra and Thomas had a serious falling out.

Later, a neighbor of Edison’s, who knew of the friendship between Henry Ford and Edison, successfully offered to sell his home next day to Ford.

The three homes and Edison’s laboratory have been beautiful restored with either furniture that was there or what would have been there. The property fronts Caloosahatchee River (which literally means Caloosa River River) and was the winter escape of the two industrial giants.

Edison, who had more than 1,000 patents and registered at least one new one during each of 65 years of his life, was a workaholic who even while at his winter retreat often worked 21 hours a day and slept in a cot in his lab.

During the last years of his life, Edison was working on finding a substitute for rubber and was experimenting with a number of imported and exotic plants as well as local ones. In the end, he failed to find a suitable replacement for rubber trees. On the other end of his career, his first invention was for a mechanical voting machine for Congress which was a failure because Congress didn’t want something that would get in the way of a good filibuster.

So his first and last inventions were a failure, but as we all know there were plenty of successful ones in between. The Estates were by comparison to other baron mansions we have toured rather modest, but still interesting to walk the property where many tycoons and at least a couple U.S. Presidents had trod.

The gardens and botanical exhibits were also very impressive. The Banyan tree, planted as a potential rubber replacement tree, started life as a four-foot tall bush now covers an acre. The picture of Joan and me with Edison’s statue is under that tree.

Following the tour we drove to nearby Arcadia, Florida, a drive of about an hour to meet with Nancy and Ken Ballard from Davison, Michigan.

Ken and Nancy are friends from our former church and it was fun to see them in their element down here. We had planned to eat at Slim’s, a barbeque restaurant about half way between our two current locations, but when we arrived we found it was closed.

So we went to Chili’s for our barbeque dinner. After a two-hour dinner we parted company and headed back to our respective campsites.

Tomorrow, it’s on to Ocala.

Joan keeps reminding me that I forgot to tell two stories, one about our stay at Jonathan Dickinson State Park and then at Calusa Campground in Key Largo.

First, the Jonathan Dickinson story: We do not shower in the trailer. We could, but the mess it makes is not worth it as long as we have another option which has always been the case at our campgrounds. At the state park in Hobe Sound I went to take a shower one day and found a man AND woman using one of the shower stalls in the men’s room at the park.

That threw me just a little, but I went ahead and slipped into another shower stall and went about my business while the couple showered together. I did notice they spoke in a foreign language, likely French, so maybe they didn’t realize there was a separation.

Secondly, at Calusa we received a list of park rules, as we usually do when we arrive at a new park. One of the rules indicated that the park was family oriented and that as a matter of culture we could expect to hear “celebratory music” at a loud volume during the day. And loud and celebratory it was.