Historic Palm Cottage

Historic Palm Cottage is one of the oldest surviving structures in Naples, built in 1895 and now preserved as a house museum by the Naples Historical Society at 137 Twelfth Avenue South, within the Naples Historic District near Third Street South. The society itself has held federal tax-exempt status since October 1965, and it has spent decades since then working to preserve the cottage and the surrounding Norris Gardens as a physical link to the city’s earliest years as a small settlement on the Gulf coast, long before the resort development that defines much of Naples today.

The cottage sits within walking distance of Third Street South’s shops and restaurants, giving visitors an easy way to fold a short history stop into a broader afternoon downtown. Guided tours walk visitors through the house’s rooms and furnishings, and the society periodically offers free or discounted tour options to broaden access, including promotions built around the property’s role in the surrounding historic district. In February 2025 the society opened the Smith Exhibit Hall, a new interactive museum space adjacent to the cottage that added display capacity for historic photographs, oral histories, and rotating exhibits beyond what the original 1895 structure alone could hold.

As a nonprofit organization rather than a government agency, the Naples Historical Society depends on membership, donations, and tour revenue to fund its preservation and education work, and its board sets tour schedules and programming independent of city or county government, even though the cottage sits on a prominent downtown parcel that has become considerably more valuable as Naples real estate over the century since the house was built. Because tour schedules can shift seasonally, with the society periodically suspending public tours during the slower summer months, checking current hours directly with the society before planning a visit is worthwhile rather than assuming a fixed daily schedule.

The surrounding Naples Historic District carries its own listing in the National Register of Historic Places, and Palm Cottage anchors that designation as one of the district’s most recognizable structures, distinguished from the newer construction nearby by its low profile, wraparound porches, and construction techniques typical of late nineteenth century Florida building. For visitors trying to understand what Naples looked like before its transformation into a golf and beach destination, Palm Cottage offers a tangible, walkable way to see that earlier chapter of the city’s history up close, paired now with the additional context the Smith Exhibit Hall provides through its expanded exhibit space just a few steps from the original cottage.