Enter Edison Park. History of Edison Park. Postcards from the Past. Join EPNA. EPNA Members. They took cool refuge within the confines of a fort outpost that had been abandoned by the Union Army after the Civil War. The large compound would evolve to one day become the city of Fort Myers. The elder of the group was Captain Manuel Alejandro Gonzalez , a Spanish sailor bound from Key West and already familiar with the Florida coastal terrain of sand, swamp, palm trees and scrub vegetation.
However, due to strife during the Civil War, the survey team did not reach the southern bank of the Caloosahatchee until February, Running through the middle of his new homestead was a quarter length of a winding creek. In , Howell A. Parker, a Civil War veteran and school teacher from North Carolina, arrived in Fort Myers to secure an appointment as a school principal, the first in the county.
In , Parker bought for speculative development a acre tract of land located just east of the Gonzalez homestead. By the next 50 years, this tract and a 7-acre portion of the Gonzalez tract, would become Edison Park.
It is perhaps ironic - or maybe by design - that the fountain entrance to Edison Park sits at the exact center of Section During one three-year period, there was a succession of four notable owners: retired New York State Senator Charles A.
Alderman, Sr. Edison, a botanist as well as inventor, and his groundskeepers turned the property into a tropical paradise. One half, the location of his laboratory and experimental garden areas, was just north of the Parker tract. The other half sat along the river, just north of the former Gonzalez homestead.
