Beach students learn history at Cottage
Beach Elementary students gained important knowledge about history on Fort Myers Beach recently.
On Friday, Dec. 16, members of the Estero Island Historic Society, led by longtime volunteer and past Board member Jo Hughes, greeted school classes from kindergarten through Grade 3.
The enthusiastic students played with holiday toys, viewed beautiful Christmas decorations and enjoyed punch, cookies and candy canes. EIHS Board member A.J. Bassett presented each class with a book on local wildlife to give as a gift to their teacher.
During Miss Catlett’s third grade class visit, Bassett and Hughes offered a Beach history lesson and told stories of the past to strengthen their points. The Cottage acts as a nature center and The Annex acts as the society’s library.
“This cottage that you were in was built in 1921 over on the beachside,” said Bassett. “It was an old cottage. That is why it is historic,” she said. “We put jars out at the library, post office and grocery stores. People were dropping dollar bills, $10s and $20s. The next thing you know, we raised $20,000 because that many people on the island wanted us to have an historic society.”
Bassett then told of The Annex, the second building of the two-building set built in 1960, and The Rain Barrel, built in 1946 and situated behind the buildings.
“We moved (The Annex cottage) from the beachside as well. It is our office,” she said. “(The Rain Barrel) collects the rain from the roof, and that is the only way you have fresh water to drink, wash hair or cook with.”
Hughes added a story when she was roughly the same age of the third graders.
‘When I was a little girl, we lived on the bayside. We didn’t have electricity because they only ran it down Estero Boulevard,” she said. “One day, a FPL worker put up a pole by the edge of the water and climbed it to work on it. My sister and I had a duck that hatched out a bunch of little ducklings. Every morning she would take them down to the bay for a swim. A blue crab in the water reached up and got one of the baby ducks by the foot and was pulling him under. The worker came off that pole, ran into the water, scared the crab off and the duckling popped up to the surface.”
The students were then told that the Historic Cottage once was a kindergarten classroom before the students graduated to the first grade and the Beach school.