Seven cents a crate
The Sanibel Historical Museum and Village tells the island's story through restored buildings moved to one site on Dunlop Road. Its timeline starts with the Calusa, who dominated the region, and with Ponce de Leon, who sailed by in 1513 and left a name on the charts, S. Nivel, that became Sanibel. The lighthouse went up on the east end in 1884 and was lit in 1885, and homesteaders followed.
Those settlers farmed. According to the museum, agriculture was the main business on Sanibel from the 1880s into the 1940s. Islanders helped each other bring in tomatoes, peppers and citrus, hauling them by mule and wagon to packing houses, where the produce was crated for shipment up north. Seasonal pickers camped in the fields and moved from one farm to the next.
One islander, Clarence Rutland, arrived in 1896 at the age of six. In the 1920s he earned seven cents for every crate of tomatoes and peppers he packed for local farmers, and his house is now one of the museum's buildings. The village also includes a replica of a packing house from about 1900.
Then the sea took the fields. The museum's timeline says the great hurricane of 1926 devastated island crops and essentially ended commercial farming, and that tidal surges in later storms left the soil useless for large scale growing. Tourism took over, with a ferry from 1925 and a causeway from 1963.
Ding Darling and the tarpon
The other half of Sanibel is wild. At the urging of the cartoonist and conservationist Jay Norwood Ding Darling, President Harry S. Truman created the Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge by executive order in 1945. It was renamed for Darling in 1967, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes it as part of the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the United States.
The refuge's friends group keeps Darling's love of tarpon fishing alive with an annual catch and release tournament. The 2026 event drew 65 teams and 309 anglers who caught and released 63 tarpon, with the money going to water quality research and education at the refuge. State rules keep the big ones wet: a tarpon longer than 40 inches is never lifted out.
