Search for ‘New Jerusalem’ brought Koreshan Unity to Southwest Florida

Notes: The following are excerpts from a July 7, 2016 article in The News-Press: “Who put Koresh in Koreshan? These Estero put the pioneers” By Amy Bennett Williams.

These communal-living, trouble-making, orchestra-loving utopians came to Estero from Chicago in the late 1800s to build the “New Jerusalem.” They never realized their dream, but they left behind more than a dozen buildings, hundreds of acres of land and a vast archive.

The ruins of the core settlements are now on display at Estero’s Koreshan State Historic Site, a Florida park.

As for the name Koresh, the leader Teed’s first name was the Hebrew version of Cyrus. He assumed that he associated himself with the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who is called “the shepherd” in the Bible. Cyrus ended the exile of the Jews in Babylon and returned them to Jerusalem (in Teed’s case, the modern version of that holy city).

Born in New York and of Baptist descent, Teed worked as a doctor in the Civil War. In 1859 he married his second cousin, Fidelia M. Rowe. They had a son named Douglas Arthur (who painted many of the treasures in the site’s Art Hall) and settled in Utica, NY, where Teed dabbled in metaphysics and alchemy. While he was working late one night in his laboratory trying to turn lead into gold in 1869, he had a life-changing experience that he called an epiphany.

He said that a divine vision appeared to him; A beautiful woman who revealed to him the secrets of the universe. As the Florida Memory Project explains, the earth was not a convex sphere, but instead a hollow, concave cell containing the entire universe, with the sun at its center.

Teed began sharing his new knowledge with patients, and some of them began calling him the “crazy doctor.”

Teed did not find many followers in upstate New York. His message fell on receptive ears only when he spoke at the National Association of Mental Sciences Convention in Chicago in 1886.

In 1888, the Koreshans moved to a house in Chicago where they lived in common. By 1893 there were 123 registered Koreshans. Most of them were highly educated, cultured and successful people, and most of them were women.

That year, Teed and three other Koreshans began searching for a place to build their sprawling earthly utopia, the New Jerusalem. They came to Southwest Florida, where German farmer Gustave Damkohler signed on and donated his 320 acres of land in Estero to them. Over the next 11 years, the group moved to Estero and began construction. They eventually owned more than 5,000 acres in Estero and Fort Myers Beach.

They built themselves an oasis of industry and civilization on the banks of the Estero River: a freestanding town complete with a sawmill, cement works, publishing house, bakery, industrial laundry, machine shop, general store, art gallery, symphony, acting troupe, nursery, and more. Although they are a religious group, the Koreshans never built a church or temple. For them, the act of living itself was worship.

Teed’s deviations from mainstream religion upset many of his traditionalist neighbors. And when the Koreshans decided to incorporate Estero in 1904, the group’s relations with the locals did not improve much. His plans were dazzlingly ambitious. Estero’s 110 square miles stretched from present-day Gladiolus Drive south of Fort Myers to one mile north of Bonita Beach Road in Bonita Springs and included what is now Lovers Key State Park and the Town of Fort Myers Beach, making it the largest city in Florida at the time.

“The new city will be on the banks of the Estero River and bay, which will now be famous as the waters on which one of the greatest cities on the continent will be located,” The Fort Myers Press declared on its front page on August 4, 1904.

The next few tense years were filled with front-page squabbles, contested elections and shouting matches at public meetings. In 1906, Teed was attacked on a Fort Myers street by an anti-Koreshan name-calling group. After this, his health began to deteriorate.

In 1907, the Florida Legislature formally dissolved Estero; It was not reincorporated until 2014.

Teed died on December 22, 1908, at the age of 69, throwing the group into turmoil from which they never recovered. At first, many followers expected him to rise from the dead by Christmas, and they waited for his resurrection until the Lee County health department ordered his burial.

The settlement continued, but the number of members dropped from 250 to 55 in 1930 and 10 in 1948.

Some members left to form new groups. Some stayed and tried to move on. However, the group shrank each year until its last member, Hedwig Michel, died in 1982.

Before doing so, he donated approximately 350 acres of land, containing nearly all Koreshan buildings, to the state of Florida. It is now a Koreshan State Historic Site.

This article first appeared in the Fort Myers News-Press: Archives: Search for ‘New Jerusalem’ brings Koreshan Corps to Estero