The people behind the park

So, who were the Koreshans?

In 1894, founder Cyrus Teed, who viewed himself as the new messiah, and his followers settled along the Estero River, where they planned to pioneer a New Jerusalem in Florida’s wilderness. The cult started in New York City in the 1870s and also had a presence in Chicago and San Francisco.

“He had an appearance from an angel when he was aged 30 and the angel told him that he was sent to redeem humanity,” Lyn Millner, a journalism professor at nearby Florida Gulf Coast University, told WINK News when discussing her book on the cult, “The Allure of Immortality.”

The Estero community, which boasted more than

250 residents at its peak, built a closed-off city that included a bakery, printing house, dining hall, store and a power plant. The settlement opened as a state park in 1967.

The Koreshans grew non-native plants, most notably bamboo, throughout their commune. Some were used for sustenance but many to glam up the colony.

The cult, which valued science and education, adopted the Fairbanks-Morse Engine in 1925 to power the village without a need for oil lamps. They even offered electricity to Estero residents.

A few of the cult’s strange artifacts survive at Koreshan State Park, including a model of the “rectilineator,” an apparatus they used to “prove” the earth was concave.

But as the years went by, the Koreshans’ population dwindled, with the last follower deeding the park to the state in 1961. Teed, the group’s founder, died in

1908.

In the 1920s, the founder’s coffin was washed out to sea — during a hurricane.