A is for Alva

An Alphabet of Southwest Florida Places

Eighteen miles up the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers you’ll find Alva. In its 150 or so years, it’s been imagined and reimagined as a citrus industry powerhouse, a bucolic farm town, a cultural oasis, and more. But always, to the lucky people who have lived there, it’s been home.

(Photo postcard by F.W. Hunt, a view from the upper Caloosahatchee)

A New Life in Florida

Margaret English, a widow, was 50 years old when she moved from near Bainbridge, Ga., to homestead along the Caloosahatchee, traveling by buggy. She started in December 1875, seven children in tow. Her son John English remembered that it took them six weeks to get there, “never traveling on Sunday,” and that once they arrived the cattlemen who lived along the river near Fort Thompson helped them to get set up and survive until their crops came in.

In a 1939 interview, John told a writer from the Federal Writers’ Project that many years after their arrival in Florida, his older brother Sampson told him that shortly before their father died in 1870 he had said that no matter what happened, the family had to stay together. And so they did.

(John and Ida English and family, c. 1900, from the State Archives at floridamemory.com)

Aside from the cowboys and visiting members of the Seminole tribe, who often came upriver, there was a neighbor, James Kellum, the area’s first physician.

“He always, as long as he lived, if we needed any doctoring, he did it, and he never sent us a bill,” John English said.

Kellum was said to have been a surgeon during the Civil War. Around 1874 he sought the peace of that nearly uninhabited part of what was then Monroe County. He planted hundreds of acres of citrus (which became part of the McGregor groves after his death in 1890) and experimented with every kind of tropical plant, even successfully growing vanilla, which was thought to flourish no further north than central America.

Kellum and the English family lost their crops and their homes in what was dubbed the “Great Overflow” of 1878, when rains flooded the river and doused lower-lying land. They all moved a couple of miles downriver.

Kellum fetched a wife, Sallie, from Manatee County in 1879. About that same time the Englishes built a house that still stood generations later. It was the family home, and the only place for anyone new in town to board or take meals. A devout woman, Margaret English asked the area’s Methodist circuit-riding preacher to hold services in the home until a church could be built.

(Margaret English, center, at the family home in Alva, from the State Archives at floridamemory.com)

Alva’s first schoolteacher, Marguerite Verdier (later Abell), wrote about her experience living with the English family while she taught school.

“Dear ‘Grandma English,’ as she was called, kept open house… She thought nothing of feeding twenty-five hungry souls on Sundays, Christmas, or other holidays. Nor did she complain at leaving her warm bed on a cold night to nurse a sick neighbor – even though she rode horseback over ten miles of dark, country roads to accomplish the task.”

Other families soon moved in – the English sons helped Dennis Hickey clear hundreds of acres for groves near what is now Hickey’s Creek. Hickey’s descendants came back to the land and ran a popular grove stand well into the 2000s. Edward Parkinson, a British man in his 20s whose father was Lord Mayor back in Barnsley, England, settled in the area around 1885 and set about making a living in the groves. He married Marguerite Verdier’s sister, Mary Carol (Mamie), and established the area’s first community packing house for citrus. He was a Lee County Commissioner and one of Alva’s leading citizens when he died of a heart attack at age 65.

(Mary Carol and Edward Parkinson’s daughter, Edwina, at school in Alva in 1914, from the State Archives at floridamemory.com)

The names English, Parkinson, and Hickey are still prominent in Southwest Florida. Also prominent is a man who left no descendants but did leave an outsize reputation, Peter Nelson, the Dane who dreamed up Alva.

Nelson’s Dream

Danish boat captain Peter Nelson had been piloting the waters in Southwest Florida since around the close of the Civil War. A man who loved art, music, and books, he also valued education. In 1878, when the unincorporated settlement of Fort Myers was part of Monroe County, he was a commissioner. He convinced the powers-that-be to grant $600 for a school in Fort Myers, and he asked his friend James Evans to donate a lot.

He then turned his attention upriver. While taking supplies to a dredge operation north of Fort Myers, he began eyeing a homestead of about 160 acres, on a plateau safe from flooding. He bought the land in the early 1880s, drew a plat of Alva in 1883, and finished the schoolhouse by late 1884. Worship services also moved there.

(Peter Nelson at Boca Grande, 1904, from Florida’s Vanishing Era by Eleanor H.D. Pearse, 1954.)

In what seems to have been a dispute over prohibition, which Nelson adamantly opposed, he was removed from the Lee County Commission in 1890. The details are featured in the late Charles Edgar Foster’s wonderful book, The Benevolent Dane. In the book, Foster exonerates Nelson and also provides the best circumstantial evidence yet that Nelson was, as he claimed, the illegitimate son of Danish royalty.

Nelson had a lively next few decades, working as a captain, becoming postmaster at Cayo Costa, and making frequent visits to Fort Myers and Alva. He continued to nurture the little town he’d founded, allowing the Alva Book Club to house books for lending in one of the houses he owned, later donating the land for the library. He died in 1919.

(The Alva library, c. 1910, with the Alva Methodist Church in the background, from the State Archives at floridamemory.com)

The library, built by Arch English and dedicated in 1909, stands today as the Alva Museum, where you can learn much more about Nelson, Alva, and the generations of families who built the town.

About the Name Alva

The town was not, it has been stressed, named for Thomas Alva Edison, who didn’t show up in Southwest Florida until 1885.

Instead, Alva is said to be named after a white flower that grew profusely on the banks of the upper Caloosahatchee and which reminded Nelson of a flower that grew in Denmark. Later sleuths identified it as sabatia brevifolia, which thrives in brackish water.

But when, exactly, did Nelson first reveal the source of the name? The earliest instance I have found is in an Alva retrospective by Marguerite Verdier Abell in the Feb. 22, 1931, edition of Fort Myers Sunday Press. Thomas Gonzalez also notes the origin story in his monograph The Caloosahatchee in 1932. If you know an earlier mention of Nelson’s little white flower, let me know!

(Sabatia brevifolia, courtesy Florida Wildflower Foundation at flawildflowers.org)