Florida History: Palm Cottage, the oldest house in Naples
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Florida has always been attractive to dreamers and schemers who envision creating cities out of the wilderness, populated with wealthy sun-seekers. Some of the cities they started have survived and flourished, notable examples being Miami on the east coast and Cape Coral on the west. Traces of those that were not successful are sometimes visible in the broken concrete of unfinished streets and entrance pillars sunk deep in weeds that twitch occasionally with the flickering movements of lizards.
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One of the survivors of these city-development projects is Naples, the southernmost metropolitan area in Southwest Florida. This small city, occupying 12.3 square miles of land on the Gulf coast of Florida about 35 miles south of Fort Myers, is situated at the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp, only some 20 miles northwest of the storied Ten Thousand Islands.
One, and seemingly the most accurate, version of the early history of Naples, states that prior to the arrival of Naples’s acknowledged founders, the Naples Town Development Company had been founded and the townsite of 3,712 acres had been surveyed; in fact, months prior to said arrival, 252 home lots had already been sold. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1887, Kentuckians John Stuart Williams, a former Confederate general turned U.S. Senator and his partner, Walter N. Haldeman, a former pro-successionist newspaper publisher turned businessman and owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal, acquired the property, and founded the Naples Company to develop it into a winter resort city. In less than a year, they had built a 600-foot, T-shaped pier into the Gulf of Mexico and a hotel two blocks inland from the foot of it, along with a general store and a post office. At this time, in the summer of 1888, Naples was occupied seasonally by some 80 people.
Today, the permanent, resident population of Naples is approximately 22,206, but it is essentially still a winter home for the wealthy, where an average household income is in the neighborhood of a quarter-million dollars and the median home value is close to $1 million.
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Naples values its history. According to the Naples Historical Society, “History is an ever-present conversation in Naples,” and the NHS is the “central voice” in that conversation.
The historical society’s “educational headquarters” is Palm Cottage, the town’s oldest house, built in 1895 by none other than Haldeman.
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Haldeman built Palm Cottage for his friend and the editor of his newspaper, Henry Watterson, thoughtfully adding extra bedrooms upstairs to accommodate the occasional overflow of tourists from his hotel.
The house was sold in 1916 to the Parmers, who not only gave the house its name, but who, also, in 1926, plumbed and wired it for electricity.
The last private owners of the house, the Browns, made it famous. In the late 1940s, their lavish entertainments, not to mention house guests, such as Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, and Heddy Lamar, made the Palm Cottage, a.k.a. the Brown House, the center of Naples’ social life.
When Alexandria Brown died in 1978, the Collier County Historical society stepped up and purchased the Palm Cottage for $100,000, and in 1996, the Naples Historical Society restored it for $300,000, thus preserving the 3,500-square-foot house as a museum.
Now on the National Register of Historic Places, this charming house at 137 12th Avenue South, just one block east of the Naples Pier, is the venue for all the NHS educational programs and events.
For those interested more in living things than in the ghosts of times past, the Norris Gardens outside the Palm Cottage are pure delight. In this one-half acre, the most prevalent gardening trends of the past 100 years are represented in The Garden of the Senses, The Palm Collector's Garden, The Edible Garden, The Pioneer Garden, The Water Garden, and The Everglades Garden.
For a more detailed history of Palm Cottage, visit https://www.explorenaples.com/historic-palm-cottage-naples-historical-society.php, and for an account of the remarkable accomplishments of the NHS in preserving Naples’ historic properties, please visit https://napleshistoricalsociety.org/.
Cynthia A. Williams (cwilliams1020@gmail.com)
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Florida History: Palm Cottage, the oldest house in Naples
