Book chronicles the making of a Southwest Florida ghost town - LaBelle, Florida, USA - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

From Amy Bennett Williams, AWILLIAMS@NEWS-PRESS.COM Published 12:00 a.m. ET Oct. 12, 2014 | Updated 11:51 a.m. ET Oct. 12, 2014

"He's the most influential man in Southwest Florida you've likely never heard of: Edgar Goodno.

Breezing into Southwest Florida in 1895, a decade after Thomas Edison made his entrance, Goodno arguably contributed as much to put this region on the map as the Great Illuminator did.

The Kansas-born entrepreneur was a developer, a land speculator, a railroad booster and the rancher responsible for importing Brahma bulls from India to fortify Florida's scrawny Cracker cattle bloodlines. Goodno financed many of the area's early improvements, including an electrical plant, an ice factory and two hotels that hosted the likes of Edison and Henry Ford. Yet for the most part, this ambitious visionary has merited little more than a footnote in area histories.

Three years ago, psychotherapist and speech writer Matthew Robb set about changing that. In his fascinating chronicle of one the most influential-yet-unknown men in Southwest Florida history, Robb brings Goodno and his tumultuous era to vivid life.

Robb's book, "Edgar Everett Goodno: A Florida Pioneer and his Ghost Town Remembered," will be released next week and on Oct. 23, he'll appear at the LaBelle Heritage Museum to discuss it and sign copies.

When he started the project, Robb hadn't intended to produce an almost 300-page book. Hendry County cattleman Dwayne House had commissioned him to write a brief history of the ghost town named Goodno on his sprawling ranch.

"I quickly realized the story can't be told without talking about Edgar Goodno," Robb says. "When I started, I didn't even know (Goodno's) father's first name, just that he'd arrived with big dreams, a small fortune and his invalid mother in 1895."

The bespectacled five-foot-four, 125-pound Goodno, dubbed "the hustler from Hustleville," started out making sandwiches on the wharf extending into the Caloosahatchee in Fort Myers and worked his way up, buying groveland in Alva, building a packinghouse there, then turning his attention to what's now Hendry County. He eventually amassed some 8,200 acres, much of it fronting the Caloosahatchee.

Having witnessed land rushes first-hand, the ferociously energetic Goodno was convinced he'd found the promised land and eventually platted a small city.

"He thought, 'If it could happen in red dirt, arid Oklahoma, this Eden I've discovered in LaBelle is going to boom.' "

Indeed, as Robb writes, Goodno's city, some eight miles east of LaBelle, seemed to have the all the right stuff — on paper. "(He) envisioned it as a robust community of some 3,000 citizens (with) enviable access to road, rail, and water transportation."

Yet for all of Goodno's promise, the throngs never arrived to populate it, "and before the 1920s really started roaring, Goodno became just another asterisk in Florida's up-and-down, boom-and-bust, flash-in-the-pan saga," Robb says.

Instead of thousands, only about 25 people ever lived in Goodno, which still appears on Florida maps.

"All that remains is a boarded-up store, a ramshackle house, and a dusty road once named Grand Avenue," Robb writes.

So what happened to Goodno's grand vision? Like so many failed Florida dreams, it fell victim to overreach and poor economic timing.

"As we look back, we see that Edgar made a common error in extrapolation," Robb writes. "Having witnessed 250,000 settlers thunder into Oklahoma 30 years earlier, he believed Southwest Florida was due its own stampede."

But it failed to materialize, and in 1922, the bank called in Goodno's loan. On the verge of losing everything, Goodno approached his old acquaintance Edison, who convinced Ford to give him a two-year loan to stay afloat. When Goodno couldn't make the payments, Ford foreclosed on him in 1924 and the press announced Ford's hush-hush plans to turn the land into a rubber plantation to help his pal Edison in his quest for a domestic source of rubber.

Paradoxically, Ford's name gave the property the cachet Goodno's hadn't. As soon as it became known that the auto magnate had bought it, speculators began licking their chops and snapping up surrounding land, offering lots for sale where they boasted of future subdivisions.

This advertisement by the LaBelle Investment Co. that ran in The News-Press is typical: "LaBelle is to be the center of the rubber industry in Florida. With experimental rubber trees now growing on Henry Ford's estate of 8,200 acres on land adjacent to the city of LaBelle, the rubber industry is soon to be a reality in Florida. The natural advantages of Hendry County, coupled with the masterful influence of Henry Ford, now, not only assures a tremendous appreciation in real estate values in the county seat — LaBelle — but makes its rise to the commercial leadership in Florida a certainty."

The speculation eventually reached such a fevered pitch that Ford's general secretary Ernest Liebold was forced to take action to quash the rumors, reports the site vintagefordfacts.blogspot.com. "There are many reports of Liebold sending threatening cease-and-desist letters to various real estate development firms."

So whatever became of the project? "Initial test plantings were encouraging, but with the Caloosahatchee River flooding the property during the rainy season and other causes, the rubber farm did not work out. The whole works was sold in 1942 to a local cattle rancher and to this day the land remains farm and cattle land," the site reports.

By that time, Goodno had turned his attention to Punta Rassa, where he'd bought a large property that included several small islands and was planning another ambitious development. But in 1936, he had a heart attack there and died.

Fort Myers real estate appraiser, historian and archivist Woody Hanson, who provided many of the book's images, sums his end up this way: "Goodno, like others seeking to over-harvest Florida's wonders and beauty, became the victim of his own quest. A land, unforgiving, took him down in 1924 and in 1936, he died — literally — of a broken heart."

For Robb, one of the lasting messages of Goodno's life is that it wasn't a failure.

"I think his story is that the history of Southwest Florida wasn't written by silver spoons and blue bloods," he says. "The whole region was lifted on the backs of hardworking people like Goodno who put in the sweat and the hard work every single day."

Amy Bennett Williams' Field Notes appear Thursdays and Sundays in The News-Press. Listen to her audiocast on WGCU Friday mornings.

If you go

• What: Discussion and signing of Matthew Robb's book, "Edgar Everett Goodno: A Florida Pioneer and his Ghost Town Remembered"

When: 6:30 p.m. Oct. 23

Where: LaBelle Heritage Museum, 360 North Bridge St., LaBelle. Free parking is available directly across North Bridge Street at Harold Curtis Honey.

Cost: The program is free.

Info: Call 863-674-0034.

• Etc.: The book will be available for sale at the museum and from online retailers like amazon.com.

Excerpts from the book

"He ran on 240 volts in a 120-volt world — rising before dawn, dashing between businesses, working into the wee hours, and rarely slowing for breaks or vacations. While other entrepreneurs were still shooting the breeze over lunch, this hardcharging dynamo was already back in his office, closing on one deal and eyeing the next. His fuel of choice: black coffee, and lots of it.

"Edgar ("please call me Ed") Everett Goodno may be an enigma today, yet through his actions and interactions a century ago, we can arrive at a better understanding of the man behind the myth.

"Wealthy, well-traveled, perpetually tanned, and blessed with his father's piercing blue eyes, Ed may have been the most eligible bachelor this side of Lee/Hendry County, yet he was cool to women and no one understood why....

"As a one-time homesteader, Ed never stopped pinching pennies. He shunned fads and frills, yet owned the most expensive car around — and deep down, he didn't mind if you knew it. After readily conceding he didn't know how to drive the contraption, he'd wink and laugh: 'That's what chauffeurs are for.'

"Ed wore a suit every dad-blamed day, even when the Florida sun cut through his Panama hat like a torch. In the evening, he would peruse a stack of newspapers from cover to cover, providing running commentary to his mother, Caroline, who sat in her rocking chair, quilt on lap, nodding in agreement.

"Ed loved his country, yet worried that Americans were becoming soft, unwilling to do the heavy lifting he once did in the Ozarks — and a soft America, he'd tell you, was an imperiled America. As an indication of Ed's grit and drive, the young people he worried about would later be known as America's 'greatest generation.' "

From Matthew Robb's "Edgar Everett Goodno: A Florida Pioneer and his Ghost Town Remembered"

Type of publication: Newspaper When was the article reported?: 10/12/2014 Publication: News Press Article Url: [Web Link] Is Registration Required?: no How widespread was the article reported?: local News Category: Society/People

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