Fort Myers' historic Shell Factory shutting down after 85 years

The Shell Factory & Nature Park, a popular Fort Myers roadside attraction since the 1930s, is shutting down and its owner is putting the 18-acre property up for sale.

In a statement issued Monday, the park says that “ongoing maintenance and necessary repairs are costly” and while “significant investments to sustain the Shell Factory’s continued operations (have been made), the sad reality is that the park is no longer viable in its current form.”

The nature park and gift shop will remain open for the last two weekends of September and the park’s two restaurants — the Southern Grill and Tommy’s Outdoor Café — will have limited menus available while supplies last.

The Fun Park is closed effective immediately.

A spokesperson says in an email that the U.S. Highway 41 property is currently not under contract and that details on who will list it and the asking price “will be forthcoming.”

“This has been an incredibly hard decision for me, and one that was not made lightly, as the Shell Factory has been such a big part of the community and my life for many decades,” owner Pam Cronin says in the statement.

The Shell Factory opened in 1938 at a time when roadside attractions drove Florida’s tourism. This was a time long before Walt Disney World and other parks opened, when according to the State Library and Archives of Florida “tourists travelled to Florida to see lush gardens, to peer through glass bottom boats, to see mermaids, and to interact with the exotic environment.”

By 1997, when Cronin and her late husband, Tom, came along, the Shell Factory had fallen into disrepair and was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure.

In a history of the property on its website, Pam says “The restaurant had shooting galleries full of spiders. The Dolphin Room (currently The Carousel Cabaret) was just a slab. There were things falling out of the ceiling. There was just a 10,000-square-foot building with shells and a dollar store.”

Under the couple's ownership, Shell Factory was transformed from roadside tourist attraction into “a sought-out destination” that today includes amusement-style rides, arcade games, miniature golf and 50,000 square feet of gift shops.

They also opened the 4.5-acre nature park, which has more than 400 animals, birds, reptiles and fish, and created The Nature Park Environmental Education Foundation, a nonprofit.

But it wasn’t always easy.

There was the recession, financial challenges and storms. Tom died in 2018 and Pam Cronin continued to run the operation through the pandemic and several more hurricanes. 

But the needs that come with “any property that is over 86 years old and of this magnitude” have proved too much to continue and efforts to find a buyer failed.

“This is an unfortunate, yet natural evolution that we have seen countless old Florida roadside attractions like ours face,” Cronin says in the statement.

She says the park's approximately 95 full- and part-time employees will have access to resources and assistance and that she is working with wildlife officials to “safely re-home” the park’s more than 400 animals.