The present site dates from 1885, when Edison first visited Florida and purchased the property to build a vacation home. His home, completed in 1887, served as a winter retreat and place of relaxation until Edison’s death in 1931. Edison’s good friend Henry Ford purchased the adjoining property in 1916. Edison’s botanical garden contains more than a thousand varieties of plants from around the world, including African Sausage Trees and a 400-foot (120 m) banyan tree given by Harvey Firestone (of Firestone Tires) in 1925. It was originally an experimental garden for industrial products. During the period of 1914-1918 (World War I), Edison became concerned that the cost of rubber was going to drastically rise. He was aware that the cost of production and transportation of this commodity would, over time, go up, so he began to work with Harvey Firestone and his already good friend Henry Ford to try to find a crop that could grow quickly and, above all, contain enough latex to support his research endeavor. In 1927, the three men created the Edison Botanic Research Corporation in an attempt to find the “solution” to the rubber crisis; its laboratory was located on the property in Fort Myers, Florida. Edison would do the majority of his research and planting of his exotic plants and trees there, and send any results or sample rubber residues up to West Orange, New Jersey, to his larger Thomas A. Edison “Invention Factory”.

The Edison and Ford Winter Estates contain a historical museum and 17 acre (6.9 hectares) botanical garden on the adjacent sites of the winter homes of Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford beside the Caloosahatchee River in southwestern Florida.