FLORIDA

Fort Myers has a deep and unusually intimate relationship with memory, and nowhere is that more visible than in the old historic cemetery near Michigan Avenue. Dating back to the 1870s, the cemetery emerged when Fort Myers was still a remote frontier settlement beside the Caloosahatchee River. Long before modern development transformed Southwest Florida, this was wilderness country of palmetto scrub, cattle trails, military outposts, and scattered pioneer homes. Today, walking through the cemetery feels like stepping into a surviving fragment of Old Florida. Massive live oaks and banyan trees cast shadows over weathered marble stones, cracked pathways, and sunken graves softened by more than a century of heat, storms, and humidity. The atmosphere is quiet and imperfectly preserved, giving the cemetery a feeling less like a formal memorial park and more like a place where history still lingers close to the surface.

The people buried there helped build early Fort Myers itself. Pioneer families such as the Hendrys and Friersons shaped the region’s cattle industry, commerce, and civic life. Veterans rest throughout the cemetery as well, including both Union and Confederate soldiers whose lives later converged in frontier Florida. One of the cemetery’s most remarkable stories belongs to Christian Henry “Dad” Funck, a Union Civil War drummer boy who later settled in Fort Myers. At only thirteen years old, Funck enlisted during the Civil War, serving as one of the young drummers responsible for relaying battlefield commands under fire. After being wounded and discharged, he eventually arrived in Fort Myers in the 1870s when the settlement consisted of only a handful of residents clustered around the old fort. What makes his burial especially striking is that many of the area’s leading citizens and pioneer families had Confederate backgrounds, yet Funck became part of the community and spent the remainder of his life there, operating a bakery and raising a family. In the old cemetery today, Union and Confederate veterans rest within the same quiet ground, sometimes only a short distance apart, reflecting the complicated realities of postwar frontier Florida where survival and settlement often mattered more than lingering divisions.

That connection between land, remembrance, and American history is part of why Fort Myers also ties naturally to The Patriot Soil Project, cofounded by Fort Myers native Mary Middleton Robinson. The project creates living memorials called Patriot Trees using soil respectfully gathered from the resting places of veterans across the country. Soil has been collected from more than 500 resting places and later expanded into thousands of veterans’ graves nationwide. In a place like the old Fort Myers cemetery, where veterans, pioneers, and forgotten families rest beneath ancient trees and weathered stones, the symbolism feels especially powerful. The project transforms remembrance into something living — roots, growth, and future generations nourished by the memory carried in the soil itself.

Modern Fort Myers now surrounds the cemetery with roads, neighborhoods, and city life, yet inside its boundaries the atmosphere still belongs to another era. Beneath the oak branches and drifting Spanish moss, the cemetery preserves the feeling of the original frontier town and the people who shaped it.