Nine women and their pivotal roles in Fort Myers, Florida, history

The following contains excerpts from a March 28, 2015, article in the News-Press entitled “The nine women who shaped Fort Myers” by Cynthia A. Williams.

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The story of Fort Myers – from a military fort to an international destination for sun seekers – is as astonishing, amusing and deeply moving as the ongoing pageant of human endeavor anywhere. But fully half the story of Fort Myers is generally omitted from written histories, and that is the part that women have played.

The men in early Fort Myers history were powerful and visionary. They were cattlemen, merchants, railroad men, bankers, industrialists and inventors; and they invested their time and money in enterprises that would increase their wealth and in doing so, built a fine city.

But their wives and the independent women of early Fort Myers were neither idle nor ineffectual. Some of their names are legendary. It is the slow alchemy that civic-minded and philanthropic women can perform to turn buildings into schools and libraries, hospitals and performing art centers.

Many of our streets, buildings, gardens and art centers bear the names of these remarkable women, whose achievements are all the more impressive because most of them lived in an era in which women were not even allowed to vote.

Nine women, in particular, have played pivotal roles in the development of Fort Myers.

Evalina Gonzales

The first of these women is Evalina Gonzales, one of the two females who first stepped onto the site of the abandoned federal fort in 1866 to begin the brutal labor of building a home here.

Gonzales gave this raw settlement a future by beginning the greater labor of educating its children.

Jane Hendry

Captain Frances Asbury Hendry, the cattle king of south Florida, is generally acknowledged to be the father of Fort Myers, but his cousin’s wife, Jane Hendry, is the mother of Fort Myers, for she led the powerful Hendry clan to the struggling little settlement on the river, and with the arrival of the cattle industry, the development of a few homesteads into a prospering town was assured.

Olive Stout

Olive Stout, publisher with her husband Frank of the Fort Myers Press, founded the first women’s club in Fort Myers, which began the serious work of cleaning up this town as it prepared to trade its cowboy hats for bowlers.

Stout, with other women of courage and long-range vision, gave us our first public reading room, precursor to the first Fort Myers library, and fought for our first hospital.

Stout, with other like-minded and vigorous women, put some elbow grease into the brawling cow town that Fort Myers was in her day and truly made it shine.

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Tootie McGregor

At the turn of the new, 20th century, Tootie McGregor gave us two world-class hotels that astonished wealthy visitors and elevated considerably their perception of the potential of Fort Myers for investment; she lifted the face of Fort Myers out of its own sewage with the construction of a seawall along its river edge; and, with McGregor Boulevard, she laid the infrastructure of Fort Myers for the building boom of the 1920s.

Mina Edison

Mina Edison leveraged her wealth and position to support and promote beautification, conservation, education and cultural programs in the developing city, helped immeasurably in grooming and elevating Fort Myers to its next level of civic and social development.

Mary Flossie Hill

In 1905, Mary Flossie Hill opened the first store in Fort Myers catering exclusively to the needs of women. M. Flossie Hill’s Department Store would become one of the most prominent retail establishments in Fort Myers for the next 60 years, and Flossie Hill would sit on civic committees and boards and councils as one of the town’s leading progressive civic leaders all of her life.

Hill helped in very large measure to guide and encourage the growth and development of Fort Myers for the first 50 years of the 20th century.

Barbara Balch Mann

Barbara Balch Mann, as co-founder of Fort Myers’ first community choir and first community concert association, of the Southwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, of the Lee County Alliance for the Arts, and as the catalyst for Southwest Florida’s first performing arts center – the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall – gave the gift of music, theater, dance and opera to countless generations to come, elevating Fort Myers to pre-eminent status in Southwest Florida for the performing arts.

Bernese (Berne) Barfield Davis

Bernese Barfield Davis’ massive contributions to this city include the endowment of a professorship of horticulture and landscape design at Florida Gulf Coast University, the restoration of the Edison-Ford Estate, and the rescue and resurrection of the neoclassic treasure that was the former post office and federal building in downtown Fort Myers, and that now bears her name – The Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center – making it the crown jewel of Fort Myers and turning the River District into a continuing celebration of the fine arts.

Dr. Ella Mae Piper

One of the greatest legends in Fort Myers history is Dr. Ella Mae Piper, whose business, philanthropic and civic achievements for a woman of color in the Jim Crow era are astounding.

While the great white women in early Fort Myers history were working for social and civic improvement on their side of the tracks, Piper was working almost single-handedly for the same thing on her side of the tracks.

Among her legacies are the first high school for black children in Fort Myers, the first black hospital and the first black chapter of the American Red Cross. The benefit to the Dunbar community and to the larger community of Fort Myers in aiding and educating the impoverished children of her time and place are incalculable.

Read the full story at the link on this page.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Nine women and their pivotal roles in Fort Myers, Florida, history

Reporting by Cynthia A. Williams, Special to The News-Press / Fort Myers News-Press

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This story was originally published September 20, 2026 at 5:08 AM.