The following are excerpts from a June 8, 2018, article, “The house Papa built on Lee Street started a community” by Cynthia Williams in the Fort Myers News-Press. Read the full article at the link on this page.
José Vivas and Manuel González came to the abandoned army post of Fort Myers in 1866. González had had his eye on it as a perfect place to homestead for years. During the last of the Seminole Wars in Florida (1850-1858), Key West sea captain González had contracted with the U.S. Army to run supplies from Key West to Fort Brooke at Tampa and to Fort Myers on the Caloosahatchee.
The fort was reactivated during the Civil War, but when the troops were withdrawn in 1865, González and his wife, Evalina, prepared to leave Key West and make a home for their family among the gardens and expensively finished buildings of the deserted fort.
Naturally, their adopted daughter, Anna, and her future husband, Joe Vivas, would join them.
In February 1866, Captain González set sail for Fort Myers with Joe Vivas, his brother-in-law, John Weatherford, and his 5-year-old son, Manny. When they arrived, the men were dismayed to find the gardens trampled and houses and other buildings of the fort dismantled and hauled away by scavengers. Nevertheless, González sent his companions back to Key West for his family and household goods, and he and his boy stayed to fix up the only house left standing. Its floors, doors and windows had been axed out, but the essentials—the fireplace and the roof—were intact.
In Key West, Joe Vivas and his darling, 16-year-old Anna (neé Cristiana Stirrup) married quickly, on March 6, and set sail with Evalina and 2-year-old Mary for Fort Myers, arriving on March 13.
Young Vivas claimed the land just east of the González claim; his property (officially deeded to him in 1877 for a payment of $400) was 100 feet wide and stretched from the river to present-day Second Street.
Joe and Manuel axed down pines and built a small log house for the newlyweds and a one-room trading post. Indians came with animal hides and furs to trade for the supplies that Joe and Manuel brought from Key West. The women planted corn and melons, sugar cane and green vegetables. They managed.
Starting a settlement
Within two years, two more families with children had joined them. The González and Vivas couples, intentionally or not, had started a settlement.
In 10 years, the settlement had 10 families and a one-room, log school house. Joe and Anna had three children; the youngest, Santiago, was a year old.
Cattlemen had moved in and Joe worked cattle some, acting as a translator out at Punta Rassa where the cattle were driven for shipment to Cuba. Principally, however, he was a carpenter. In Key West, Joe had become an able seaman; in frontier Fort Myers, he had, of necessity, become an expert woodworker.
In the summer of 1883, Anna gave birth to Leonora, their seventh child, and Joe completed their commodious new home at First and Lee Streets. It was a grand occasion when Papa led his 5 children, in stairstep order— 4-year-old Rosa trailing and followed by her mother, who cradled newborn Nora in her arms—across the sun-dappled porch and through the front door into the cool interior of the excellently crafted house. A broad, central hallway ran from the front door, which opened onto First Street, to the back door, which opened onto the river. Down this hallway flowed the cool, flower-fragrant breezes that swayed the Spanish moss draping the limbs of the massive old oaks outside, and drifted Anna’s sheer curtains across the broad windowsills.
In 1885, the settlement that Papa Vivas and Grandpa González had started only 19 years before was incorporated as the town of Fort Myers. Papa was now a building contractor. He built the Hendry-Towles wharf at the end of Hendry Street and in 1886, he built the town’s first two bridges: one across Billy’s Creek and the other across Whiskey Creek on the cattle trail to Punta Rassa. Then, he began to build houses, because Fort Myers was filling up.
In 1888, Papa Vivas stepped out the front door of his fine home, settled his hat firmly on his head, and set off for town. He had been elected to the town council.
Joe Vivas died in his home, surrounded by his family, in 1909. The funeral was held in his house. It was late October, so it’s possible that a breeze played down the broad central hallway, past the front parlor where the casket stood, banked with gardenias, and that taking Joe’s spirit with it, the breeze wandered out across the back veranda to the bright river that had brought the good-looking 22-year-old youth into the wilderness of 43 years past.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: From the Archives: Lee Street and the house that ‘Papa’ built
Reporting by Fort Myers News-Press / Fort Myers News-Press
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