The house that Thomas built is falling down.

One hundred and seventeen years of dry rot, termites, mildew, fungi, rats, raccoons, several hurricanes and the hellish Southwest Florida subtropical ether have rent a mighty toll on the finest spruce ever lumbered off Maine and barged up the Caloosahatchee to this Lee County "cow town."

That's how inventor Thomas Alva Edison described Fort Myers when he arrived here by schooner in March of 1885. Still, the New Jersey genius fell in love with a bamboo-wild 13-acre tract on the river a mile from the saloons and cowboys downtown. He purchased the property on the spot, for just under $3,000, ordered up the pre-cut Northern wood, shipped it south and started to build.

"What's Edison Doing?" screamed a headline in the Fort Myers News-Press, which covered the genius' every wink and nod in this city for half a century.

The answer: Edison was hammering tiny Fort Myers and rural Southwest Florida onto the national map.

After all, Tom was already one of the most famous people on Earth-the electrical wizard who had perfected the light bulb, the phonograph, motion picture camera, storage battery and a thousand other inventions-by the time he came to Fort Myers. "Winter Home of Thomas Edison," city signs and brochures soon bragged. Later, billboards added the name and association of automobile magnate Henry Ford, who moved next door in 1916. Energized by such resident icons, the quaint cow town grew into a beautiful Florida burg, a hideaway for a few of the rich and famous, and a popular tourist destination.

Florida's Mount Vernon, it's been called. The crown jewels of Southwest Florida. The Statue of Liberty of Fort Myers. The laid-back "paradise" where the two giants of the American Industrial Age relaxed body and mind. Among Eden-like citrus and tropical palm gardens, with hanging sausage trees dancing in balmy riverside breezes, Ford and Edison smoked cigars and hung out together a few weeks each year, replenishing their genius away from the maddening push to accomplishment that marked the lives of both remarkable men.

Now, this blessed retreat that wintered Edison-Ford family and friends for nearly half a century is in serious trouble. Structural dilemmas abound, especially in the main structures-"Seminole Lodge" (Edison's home) and the adjoining guest house-enabled by an astoundingly nonexistent city maintenance program-have sent embarrassed Fort Myers and Lee County leaders scrambling through a political mire for emergency repair and restoration funds. Stories earlier this year in the News-Press detailed millions of dollars in estate revenues siphoned off into other city funds, inexpertly manipulated by the city stewards of yore-more than five decades of inexcusable neglect and disregard.

In a desperate plea for help to Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Fort Myers Mayor Jim Humphrey used the word emergency seven times: "In short, the homes are in danger of falling down," he said.

The houses that Thomas built had not even been tented for termites. Obvious holes and outside rots were patched inappropriately. Vermin control was relegated to occasional sprinklings of poisonous chlordane on the grounds. Stunned, the Charles Edison Foundation, which owns most of the estate artifacts, threatened to take everything to New Jersey unless the city relinquished control of the estate treasury. The foundation then demanded that a private citizens' group supervise restoration of the estate and its future management.

To do it right, say historic appraisers, carries a price tag in easy excess of $11 million. The goal is to restore the whole complex-nine buildings and a botanical garden-to the look and feel of 1929, when the estate was at its peak: Edison was in his lab conducting rubber research, Ford was next to him testing the V8 motor, and Harvey Firestone, founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., was hanging out, licking his chops.

"This estate is going to be saved. And it is going to be done right," promises Mayor Humphrey, who risked his political career wresting control of the estate from the city council. A board of trustees-21 leaders and historical experts-was created last summer as the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates, chartered as the new managers of the decaying estate.

An able and experienced museum director, Chris Tenne Pendleton, was assigned the top job. "Private management is the preferred form of governing historic sites and museums," she says, pointing out that other famous estates, such as Monticello and Biltmore. have been privately managed with restoration guidelines for two decades. "In the past we were seen more as an attraction than a historic site, a department of the city that provided revenue for the general fund.."

Supervising architect Linda Stevenson, whose restoration expertise brought back the grandeur of Sarasota's Ringling mansion Ca'd'zan, welcomes the change. "Sure, the architectural setting is subdued compared to Ca'd'zan, but this is a different estate," she says. "The integration of the architecture, the landscaping, the way the site is laid out and the tremendous work Edison personally did on the property is all bundled up together to make this one of the most significant historical sites in the country."

In a corner of one building sits a stack of Edison's wood siding. Pieces of various lengths, some splintered, many caked with paint, are named and numbered. The scarred wood waits for patient men who will use the tools of a surgeon to patch, scrape, refinish, repaint and otherwise shore up each skanky, ratty snippet of siding plank. Then, after structural damage is repaired, the puzzle will be reassembled onto the historic house just like original architect Alden Frank (a railroad designer from Boston) intended.

"That's the original stuff there. If this were a normal house, you'd throw all of that away and replace it with new wood," says Harold Wheeler Sr., historic division manager of Chris-Tel and a restoration contractor at the Edison-Ford estates. "But that would not be historically accurate."

Wheeler warily eyes a worker carrying several non-historical broken boards out to a dumpster. He does not like to see anything thrown away: "Every man who works out here knows our motto: 'We throw the man away before we throw away the board.'"

Such is the anal nature of modern historical restoration. Slow, methodical, intense interest in every detail. Everything catalogued, photographed, protected, restored. Bar codes on all artifacts. Paint peeled back layer upon layer, to discern the color for the restoration year. Searching the world for matching tile. Erring on the side of restoration and conservation rather than replacement. "We are actually using very traditional techniques. Not a lot of high tech going on out there," says Stevenson. "Most everything is hand crafted with absolute attention to detail. It's all about protecting the structure and bringing it up as close as you can to current codes, then concealing the new work, integrating it into the original design with original materials."

"When historical restoration is done correctly, it is a true art," says Barry Flaherty, who has supervised several major restoration efforts on historic structures in St. Petersburg. "From what I can see, this is absolutely being conducted state of the art."

Some things will have to change. Edison's original wiring will remain in the house for "curatorial accuracy," but alongside will be installed modern, up-to-code wiring. (Edison's original Electrolier fixtures, however, will be restored, not replaced.) The buildings will have to be anchored hurricane safe. A fire suppression system will be installed. The restoration must also meet demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Most seriously damaged of the nine estate structures is the guest house, also known as the Gilliland House. Termites have eaten through vertical support beams more than five feet off the ground. In the worst beams, the touch of a finger turns wood to powder. The house was roped off from tours (nearly 300,000 people visit each year) and jacked up to "stabilize the building envelope," in construction jargon. Some 50 raccoons were trapped and removed. Every wooden stud in the house has been replaced, and structural repairs are continuing.

While city leaders debated whom was to blame, who should be in charge and where to get the money, a restoration plan has taken shape. Over the next several years, if the money is available, complete renovations will include the caretaker's cottage (oldest building on the property), the main Edison house, the guest (Gilliland) house, the seawall and dock, the swimming pool/bath house/tea house complex; the botanic lab Ford built for Edison in 1928, Edison's tiny office and the clever concrete cistern Edison designed to provide water for himself and his extensive gardens.

Ford's house, built in 1911 with Lee County heart pine, is not in immediate danger. The auto baron bought the place from its original owner, Robert Smith and it remained occupied and maintained until purchased by Fort Myers in the late '80s. A two-story vernacular country-style bungalow, it was named Mangoes after Ford's favorite tropical fruit. For many years, tours of the two houses were separate; the estates were finally combined in the mid-'90s. After the Edison complex is repaired, says Pendleton, work on Ford will begin. A priority will be obtaining authentic furnishings to replace period copies now on display. "When the time comes, we'll definitely be contacting the Fords," says Pendleton.

***

Some historians say Edison was looking for a low-stress winter homesite; he suffered from neuralgia, nervous tension from overwork. Others say he was on the hunt for tropical vegetable fibers (for use in his incandescent lamps) when he and best friend and business manager Ezra Gilliland came to Florida in 1885. They hit St. Augustine, Cedar Key, Tampa Bay, Sarasota Bay, Charlotte Harbor and finally Punta Rassa, where they heard tales of wild bamboo growing near the Caloosahatchee River, stalks 60 feet tall. Fort Myers, tiny, wild and subtropical was the nearest town

A fisherman showed Edison the old Summerlin place-a former cattle stop that included 660 feet along the river and 1,660 feet inland, chopped in two by a public right-of-way and cattle path (now known as McGregor Boulevard). Edison bought it on the spot, worked out a deal on four acres for Gilliland, and launched into a building project the likes of which Southwest Florida had never seen. "I want to carry everything to excess down here," Edison wrote his caretaker.

Receipts show that each man spent about $12,000 to build and furnish their houses-large sums in those days. Tons of muck, oil coke, phosphorous and guano were dumped on the land to improve the soil. The first barge of building supplies arrived in January of 1886. The longest dock on the Caloosahatchee was extended to the deep-water channel (over 800 feet) to unload the very first pre-cut timber kit houses in the country-two-story wood-frame structures sheathed in spruce clapboard.

"It makes you wonder about a man as smart as Edison going to the expense of floating in Maine spruce when he was surrounded by virgin Florida heart pine, the finest building material you could get," says Flaherty. "Spruce is yum yum, a delicacy to termites and all manner of vermin. You don't build houses with spruce down here."

Edison and his new wife, Mina, arrived to inspect the property in March 1886 and returned a year later. Both houses were nearly identical "conservative interpretations of the Queen Anne style popular during the last quarter of the 19th century," according to a city-commissioned Historic Structures Report: deepbracketed eaves, symmetrical windows and doors, multi-chromatic color scheme, cedar wood shingles. Gracious rambling buildings with a spectacular view of the Caloosahatchee.

One thing is for certain: "This was not a home engineered for Florida," confirms architect Wiley Parker, one of a team of experts overseeing restoration efforts. "There aren't even overhangs to keep rain off the porch."

On the other hand, no one is complaining about the electrician. A super Edison dynamo provided DC power. Marvelous Edison Electroliers hung throughout the houses. The dock was illuminated with electric lights. Edison's electric launch Reliance was moored near a boat house where the inventor, lore says, used to sit for hours, thinking, holding a fishing pole, line in the water and no hook.

No Edison estate would be complete without a laboratory, which the inventor fully equipped and staffed (at a cost of $16,000) to begin experiments with bamboo filaments, a ship-to-shore telegraph and coal-thermal electricity.

When they left in the spring of 1887, however, the Edisons did not return for 14 years and the house stood vacant, watched over by a caretaker. A feud had erupted between Edison and Gilliland over the sale of patent rights to the Edison phonograph. By 1890, Edison ordered the water shut off at Gilliland's portion of the property. Gilliland eventually sold his portion to Ambrose McGregor of the Standard Oil fortune and disappeared into the ignominy of history as the man who ripped off Edison.

Edison and his wife finally came back in 1901; they returned, nearly every year, usually in February, until the inventor died in 1931. In 1906, Edison bought the Gilliland property and lined the avenue through his property and all the way into downtown with royal palms that stand to this day. Edison's gift inspired the city's official nickname: The City of Palms.

For the next four years, the estate underwent extensive remodeling and reconstruction, much of it dictated and supervised by Mina, who quickly became a leading figure in Fort Myers community affairs. Archives reveal her obsession with excruciating details. Both houses were remodeled, again, and the Edison kitchen moved to the guest house. The character of the estate now approached the modern craftsman style: built-in cabinetry, large openings between living and dining spaces, multi-pane doors and window sash. The wraparound porches were widened. The first swimming pool in Florida was dug there in 1910 (built with-what else?-Edison Portland Cement).

The Edison botanical gardens began to take shape during this period. The formal, family and social gardens surrounding the homesites include 70 varieties of palm and all manner of fruit trees and flowering shrubs; today, 14 championship trees are listed at the site. Rare and exotic flora share space with native Florida vegetation, everything carefully designed and plotted by the inventor and his wife.

"This is just as much a botanical gardens as it is a historical site," says director Pendleton. The existing fabulous gardens, internationally regarded, will be "phenomenal" when restoration is completed, she says. "There are historic houses and there are historic gardens, but it is very rare for an estate to have both."

Another flurry of building activity began in 1916, the year Ford purchased the house and two-acre property next door. Over the next few years, Edison completely overhauled the water and electrical systems; in 1919 the ingenious cistern was built and the inventor turned off his dynamo in favor of the city's AC power-with the requisite monthly electric bill.

In 1928, much to the chagrin of Fort Myers citizens, Ford convinced his pal to let him dismantle and reassemble Edison's lab at his historic Greenfield Village complex in Dearborn, Mich. Another laboratory, built east of McGregor Boulevard and dedicated to the rubber experiments which dominated Edison's last few years, was built by Ford as a replacement. The new lab, still standing today, features belt-driven machinery, obsolete even in those days. Today, it is a low-light, eerie place filled with green glass tubes and machinery.

Wheelchair bound, deaf and subsisting almost totally on milk, the white-haired inventor was often seen rolling across McGregor, going to and from his lab. He stayed a little longer during his 1931 visit, all the way through June. A few weeks later, he suffered a debilitating stroke at his New Jersey home. The "man who invented tomorrow" died Oct. 18, 1931. Several months later, Ford unveiled the V8 he had developed with his friend looking on.

Mina continued to visit, exploring plans to turn the estate into a college or museum. Finally, a few months before she died Aug. 24, 1947, she bequeathed the estate to Fort Myers. At her death, she was, perhaps, the city's most beloved resident: a generous, extroverted woman who pioneered an organized approach to civic improvements with her regular Round Table meetings at the estate with city leaders and businessmen.

In her last meeting, right in the living room where she sat many nights reading with her husband, Mina voiced her wishes for the estate's future. But many were never followed.

"That will also change," promises Mayor Humphrey, who has asked the new trustees to ":please always keep Mrs. Edison's desires in mind."

No one has lived in the estate since 1947, when it was roped off and opened for limited tours. It eventually became a full-time, major Florida tourist destination, the sixth most-visited historic home in the country (just behind Monticello and ahead of The Hermitage). It costs $18 to see the whole place now, and it is fabulous and informative.

So much history has disappeared,.

but Pendleton is optimistic that visitors can revisit the past: "The spirit of Edison and Ford has never vanished from the estate. We have been incredible trustees of the Edison myth and legend." Aesthetic improvements will enhance the property's river presence, a major aspect to life here. "Vistas, sight lines, the feeling of Edison and Ford sitting on the porch in 1920s clothing, catching the breeze-those improvements will definitely strengthen the experience of any visitor to the estate," she says.

The most obvious alteration of history: all nine acres of Edison's research and botanical gardens east of McGregor were uprooted and replaced with asphalt and visitor amenities. The 1928 storehouse garage is now a gift shop. Growth was stopped on the famous walking banyan tree (second or third largest in the world, with a canopy 400 feet across). Mina and Tom Edison, avid gardeners and bird watchers, have been rolling in their graves ever since.

"It was unfortunate, but when this was done, there was nowhere else to park cars for the hundreds of thousands of people who were visiting each year," sighs Pendleton, who says the city has now secured nearby property for parking. "Restoring the east side of McGregor will be the most obvious dramatic change to the estate."

The new design will once again allow the incredible banyan to resume its walking growth, she promises.

After Mina's gift, sole maintenance responsibility for the estates remained in the hands of the city, which "had no overall prioritized plan for repair work, and no clear preservation philosophy," according to the Historic Structures Report. The report heavily criticized the city's watch over the estate, even citing an inaccurate reproduction of Edison's office (which burned in 1968).

The report echoed what local preservationists had been complaining about for years. Color schemes were changed. Historic building fabric was discarded. Original shuttered louvers were tossed away. Wood roof shingles were replaced with asbestos. Landscape, walkways and river vistas altered, grown over or ignored. The furniture inexplicably rearranged in the laboratory. Inappropriate green bottles (not the high-purity chemical containers Edison used) placed about the lab. The list goes on.

In 1993, a decade before the city took action, preservationist Dr. Diana Jarvis Godwin warned that "the greatest problem at the Edison-Ford complex is the complete lack of any coherent renovation and maintenance plan."

A famous Edison proverb, listed in a display at the estate museum, advises that "There's always a way to do it better. Find it." Fort Myers has been forced to find a better way. Public uproar after exposé articles by News-Press investigative reporter Lee Melsek brought the Charles Edison Foundation to town. A sleeping giant had awakened. Suddenly the Edison-Ford Estate was granted priority ranking at city hall. City leaders, at first stubborn about relinquishing control, were eventually convinced by the mayor and public opinion to remove the estates from the political.

"The future of this precious treasure is now in your hands," said Humphrey at the initial trustees meeting of the new nonprofit Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates. With an impartial overseer and definite restoration plans, the public funding gates are opening again. So far, $9 million (city, county, state and foundation funds) has been promised. A transition period will end in 2005 when the city will be totally out of the management picture.

"You can feel it. You can see it. Change is occurring daily. A year ago there was no restoration work going on. Now there is," says Pendleton. "It is exciting. When completed, this will be the most fabulous restored historic estate in this country."

It's only fair. When Thomas Edison first came to town, he electrified small-town boosters with a quip: "There's only one Fort Myers, and 90 million people are going to hear about it."

Edison kept his part of the bargain.