COLLIER'S RESERVE COUNTRY CLUB
A national economic panic in 1893 wiped out the Disston family fortune and Hamilton Disston died three years later in his native city, Philadelphia, at the age of 51. He actually received only 1.6 million acres and permanently drained only 50,000 of them. His heavily mortgaged properties, including the rest of Florida land that he'd bought for pennies an acre, were sold off.
The modern history of Naples started when the land that became the city was originally surveyed in the late 1800s. Advertisements were placed in northern magazines and newspapers that praised Southwest Florida and compared it to Naples, Italy. At the time, the surveyed real estate in Naples was listed for sale at $10 per lot.
A senator from Louisville, Kentucky and former Confederate General, John S. Williams, was very attracted by descriptions of the area and planned to visit Southwest Florida, buy land and develop a city. He recruited Walter Haldeman, the owner of the Louisville Courier Journal newspaper, for the expedition. In 1885, the
men chartered a boat and sailed down the coast looking for a piece of mainland where they could establish their city. As they sailed by the location of present-day Naples, they noticed the miles of beaches, and when they discovered a bay just behind the beach, they thought they had found paradise.
The Naples Town Improvement Company was founded in the fall of 1886 to establish a town named Naples, reminiscent of the Italian peninsula. The objective was building a town based on tourism as well as rail and sea commerce. The company
The Founding of the City of Naples
purchased 8,700 acres for $13,050 or $1.50 per acre from the Florida Land Company which had been organized to market the lands acquired by Hamilton Disston and his associates. The squatters in the area protested the acquisi-
tion of the land and could have purchased the land on which they had taken up residence and con-
structed improvements for such a
provision was included in the Disston contracts. Squatters
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