- December 24, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
You can almost see it.
Thomas Edison and Henry Ford riding up the Caloosahatchee River from their estates a mile away to the dock of Jack’s Bar in Fort Myers. It’s a scorching day in Southwest Florida. The sky is brilliant as the sun begins to fade. The two American geniuses sit at the bar hunched over notebooks and chatting up locals over a drink. Or two.
This is the Fort Myers of 1899, and Jack’s is a bustling bar on the river, the kind of place where both big and small gather to socialize. A pier lined with boats stretches 90 feet out into the river and, when night falls, well, these are still the pioneer days Florida, so who knows what happens when the sun goes down.
Jack’s Bar was on what is now Riverside Drive and on a site that, decades later, would house a crab processing plant.
Roger Hutchison, the 59-year-old president and CEO of military contractor CRI, has owned it since 2011. He redeveloped the 1.5-acre…
