Florida is one of the world's top tourist destinations - an incredible 80 million visitors each year. I guess their impression of Florida comes almost entirely from the restricted parts of the State tourists visit – the Gulf and Atlantic coastal resorts and the Disney complex at Orlando. The rest of the state – particularly the agricultural areas of Florida's interior - is pretty much ignored.
The tourist areas are well-developed and generally affluent; the interior is mainly agricultural, reliant to a large extent on immigrant labour and less well off. It had often occurred to me that there must be huge differences between these two parts of the state and the short trip I made around some of Florida's interior towns and cities was an opportunity to see if this was the case as well as learning a little more about the State.
The route I followed was from Naples (A) on the Gulf coast through Fort Myers to Cape Coral (B), Rotunda (C) and Venice (D); then east to Arcadia (E), west again to route 27 to Lake Placid (F) and north to Sebring (G); north through Avon Park, Lake Wales and Haines City (H) before turning south to Okeechobee, (I) round the western shore of Lake Okeechobee to Clewiston (J) and back to Fort Myers (K).
Cape Coral
It doesn’t take long to realise that speculative real estate development has been a driving force in much of Florida's recent past.
Cape Coral is on the western side of the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers. With more than 160,000 residents, it's one of the fastest growing areas in Florida. Cape Coral is the third largest city geographically in the state of Florida and is the eleventh largest city in population. But Cape Coral is remarkably recent in origins and tells you a lot about urban development in Florida.
Cape Coral started to be built about 50 years ago by two land speculators, Leonard and Jack Rosen, who believed that the property's location and Gulf Coast sunshine offered opportunities for waterfront living. Through their Gulf American Corporation, the Rosen brothers began purchasing plots in 1957, planned out the community and created more than 400 miles of canals to create a city with an area of 115 square miles. The brothers began a massive marketing campaign that hyped up the investment potential of their real estate and resulted in the sale of nearly all of the 350,000 residential building sites, the majority to people who lived in other states, although only about 100,000 people actually moved to Cape Coral.
The Rosens were victims of their own initial successes. Eventually, their aggressive marketing caught up with them as Gulf American took on more debt simply in order to keep up with the demand for the real estate they were creating. In 1969 they unloaded Gulf American onto a company called GAC, which struggled with Cape Coral for 10 years before going bust. The Rosens walked away with about $10m each but left a half-finished town with more vacant lots than houses.
There's a short route you can follow which takes you through the housing developments the Rosens marketed, which give you a sense of what Gulf American's sales people were pitching in the early-1960s, past the Yacht Club they built and where out-of-state prospects were lunched and given an enthusiastic sales talk. You get a sense of what they were selling here.
I then drove north out of town through the vast undeveloped lots on land previously owned by the Matlacha Cattle Ranch, which the Rosens gobbled up. This land was originally covered with pines but had been deforested by lumber companies in the 1920s and '30s. This was part of their plan, but never got finished. It's still a desolate area today and one wonders why anyone would have wanted to buy a vacation home so far from anywhere.
Rotunda
There's a similar story at Rotunda, a town of about 7,000 on the isolated coast of Charlotte County, just north of Charlotte Harbour. This was another speculative development – although a very unusual one – whose original promoters also eventually failed.
Rotunda West was originally developed by the Cavanagh Communities Corporation. The land on which Rotunda sits was owned originally by William and Alfred Vanderbilt, direct descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The brothers acquired the Rotunda land (36,000 acres) in 1952, where they raised cattle. The Vanderbilt’s dug wells to get their water, and built a dam which separated the Gulf’s salt water from the ground-filtered brackish water their wells provided. They paid $700,000 for the 36,000 acres of Rotunda land and sold it to Cavanagh Leasing Corporation of Miami in 1969 for $19.5 million, when ranching became uneconomical.
Rotunda is built according to a unique circular plan, draining outwards to Rotunda River. Cavanagh kept changing its name to fit its objectives, but in reality it was a land sales business. Even before Rotunda adequately took root, Cavanagh was directing profits from Rotunda lot sales into casino/hotel building in Atlantic City. Following exposure of the usual sharp sales practices, they sold the entire Rotunda complex in 1980 after several years of financial difficulties.
Rotunda from the air
You can see from the aerial photograph that Rotunda is shaped like an incomplete wagon wheel. A closed, fresh-water canal system surrounds the outside of the "wheel" and travels inside each of the pie-shaped wedges forming the subdivisions of the development. A protected wetland to the south prevents development of that area. Each subdivision was supposed to have its own golf course. The theory was the developers could draw residents by offering "a course a day to play" but they couldn't carry through with their promises, and many developers took turns building out the area. Although the area struggled for a while during the real estate bust period of the 1980s, in 2005 it was one of the hottest areas to build in, with development escalating in nearly all of the sections and several new golf courses. Many of the home-owners are seasonal snowbirds from northern states and only live in the area part-time during the winter.
It was dusk by the time I drove into Rotunda, down one of the large boulevards. From the road you can't really see the houses and the central circle seems to be almost empty. It was a spooky experience. Even more spooky is that a quarter of Rotunda residents are of German descent. Why?
Venice to ArcadiaSR 72 east from Venice to Sebring, about 100 miles, is a flat lonely stretch. At first there are extensive fields of saw palmetto plants. After the Myakka River State Park, you move into rich pasture country, which was once populated by cattle and Florida cow pokes. At the turn of the century this was part of huge unfenced grassland known as Ninety Mile Prairie. The cow hands drove cattle to Arcadia, which became the centre of this trade after the rail road reached the town in 1886. The land eventually became consolidated in large ranches along route 72, and the Ninety Mile Prairie is now partitioned with barbed wire fences. The wolves, mosquitoes, panthers and cattle have mostly gone now.
As you travel east the orange groves begin to appear. These are apparently fairly new, having migrated from the north after a series of freezes. Oranges prefer hillier, well-drained land and I saw many more citrus groves further north. Just before Arcadia, you pass the huge processing plant of Peace River Citrus Company, and the road by this time is full of trucks loaded with oranges.
Arcadia
Following the signs to Arcadia's “historic downtown” takes you past the neighbourhoods where wealthy ranchers built their houses and many fine examples remain.
But Arcadia was known as a rowdy town of cowhands at the turn of the century. Most of the buildings on Oak Street date from the 1920s, when eight railroad trains a day passed through, although the 1906 Theatre remains (now an bric-a-brac store) and a bizarre pink arcade building which hovers somewhere between Gothic and grotesque. It’s really worth climbing the steep stairs into the theatre. Although it’s now used as a home for a junk shop, you really get the sense of what a music theatre of the time must have been like – pretty riotous, I should think. There are a few interesting old posters, publicising artists and acts from the time.
The town declined rapidly during the depression of the 1930s, but these days the downtown has been spruced up. People I spoke to told me that Oak Street had been hit hard by the recession, but all the shops are open, although they are mostly antique shops and coffee houses now. Rodeos are still held there and the cattle auction is still important.
Oak Street, Arcadia
Follow the link for a gallery of images of Arcadia
Continuing east on 72, the vast flat fields spread out, varying between cattle pasture, citrus groves and saw palmetto fields. This route brought me to Lake Placid.
Lake Placid
Lake Placid is in Highlands County, at the start of Lake Wales Ridge. It probably comes as a surprise to most people to learn that Florida has a “highlands” area. A high stretch of land in Florida means around 35 feet of elevation. Nevertheless, there are distinct hills which start at Lake Placid and this highland ridge is one of the main citrus growing areas.
Lake Placid is surrounded by 27 freshwater lakes and has around 2,000 residents and has two nicknames—"Town of Murals" and "The Caladium Capital of the World." The big surprise here are more than 40 murals painted on buildings throughout the town; as for caladium bulbs, it seems that 98% of the world's supply come from Lake Placid. The town was formerly called Lake Stearns from its charter in 1925, but was changed following a proposal by Dr. Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, a notable resident.
The murals really are fantastic. It seems that thousands of tourists visit each year to walk through the town and view the forty-three larger than life murals, all of which tell the story of the town’s history. The surrounding lakes and sports associated with them appear in these murals; local wildlife (particularly bears); notable residents, such as Dr. Melvil Dewey, Walter Coachman, Chairman of the Board, Consolidated Naval Stores Company, which was a leader in the Turpentine industry, and the town's first telephone operator, Florence Booker; important events in the town's history, like the coming of the railroad; local agriculture, particularly the citrus industry – all these are portrayed in these murals, some of which extend to a whole block in the town. At the biggest mural, the “Cracker Trail Cattle Drive”, you can listen to the sound of the cattle. Another one celebrates Annie Hill, nurse mid-wife, who attended the birth of over 1,500 children in Lake Placid. The mural "Decades of Green Dragons" portrays the first basketball team in Lake Placid, and the boy who named them.
In all, there are 140 pieces of art introduced into the town since 1992. This includes 29,879 square feet of painted murals.
To see the murals follow the link to Lake Placid murals
Sebring
Next stop was Sebring, which most people know for its International Grand Prix Racing Course, just outside the town.
It's often the case in America that the drive and vision of one person lies behind something of interest. In the case of Sebring's race track, it was Alec Ulmann, who fled from the Russian Revolution to America. He was devoted to racing and, after seeing the Le Mans Race in 1950, determined that the US should have something similar. His involvement in the transportation industry led him to search out old airfields where surplus World War II planes could be stored. At Sebring, he found the old Hendrick Field, whose virtually unused concrete runways would be perfect for racing. As Chairman of the Sports Car Club of America, he made it happen and the first race was held at the end of 1950. Today, around 100,000 attend the annual Twelve Hour Endurance Race held every March, and the track is in use for racing most of the year. There were cars racing when I went to look at the track.
Like a lot of towns in the area, the “historical downtown|” has been restored. The downtown revolves around a circular central park, which was laid out by George Sebring who founded the town in 1911 and most of the buildings around the circle date from this time or just a little later.
Avon Park
Driving north from Sebring on SR17, you climb the sandy ridge that forms the spine of the State. This undulating upland area used to be covered by pine trees, but once the sawmills had deforested the area it became the main orange growing area. It seems that the warm climate, summer rains and good drainage from the ridge through its sandy soils suits oranges well. The ridge is less susceptible to frosts, so the citrus trees were planted in their millions. Over a quarter of Sebring's 11,000 residents are employed in the citrus industry and the number doubles during the harvest season. SR17 rolls through mile after mile of orange groves, most of which between Sebring and Avon Park are Valencias.
The main drag in Avon Park really tells the story of the town. A horseman called Oliver Crosby founded the town with great ambitions in the late 1880s and he built a large hotel. When it burned down, he lost his fortune, such as it was. But the goal of outdoing Sebring and becoming a major ridge town persisted. Out-of-town investors, led by John Raab, reconstructed the main street as the “Mile Long Mall” and built the huge Jacaranda Hotel, stretching nearly two blocks, in 1918. The hotel had a brief moment of glory in the 1920, but the recession of the 1930s put paid to the town's ambitions and Raab left as broke as Crosby had done 30 years earlier.
So the Jacaranda has remained a landmark since the 1926. My inspection of the old-fashioned lobby and dining room – where I thought for a brief moment before coming to my senses that I might eat – suggested that it hasn’t changed much since then. But it’s a genuine period piece.
Lake Wales
SR 17 continues north along the ridge through the marvellously-named Frostproof. At this point, the road becomes known as the Scenic Drive.
Near Lake Wales, a turn off along Hunt Brothers Road (the Hunt family is one of the largest citrus growers on the Ridge) takes you to the huge processing plant of Florida's Natural Growers. The visitor centre is apparently well-worth a visit, but my attempt was foiled by Sunday closing. But, the plant itself has to be seen to be believed.
Lake Wales has a population of 11,000 and calls itself the Crown Jewel of the Highlands. This claim isn't really supported by reality, although the downtown is attractive. Most guidebooks bemoan the fact that the attractive Main Street vista is ruined by the deserted ten-storey Dixie Walesbilt Hotel, which no one wants to demolish but no one can afford to renew. Actually, I thought that the hotel, built in1926 as a rather grand stop-over, helped one image the towns of the Ridge during their heyday in the 1920s.
Bok Tower Gardens
A few miles north of Lake Wales is Haines City. But I couldn’t see much in this town, so I turned round and headed south again. With time in hand, I decided on a whim to visit Bok Tower Gardens just north of Lake Wales on what is called locally Iron Mountain – the highest point in the State.
You have to be sceptical of anything described as a “National Historic landmark” around here. But this is something very unusual and rather whimsical. Edward Bok was a journalist, editor and proprietor. Born of Dutch immigrant parents, he became editor of Ladies’ Home Journal when he was only 25. He transformed the paper by bringing in serious writers and he drove the publication relentlessly. When he retired, he created the gardens and had its tower built, and the grand opening in 1929 was presided over by President Calvin Coolidge.
You pay $10 for entry then drive over a mile to the Tower. The red sandy soil (hence Iron Mountain) supports endless citrus groves. The Tower is twenty stories tall, built of pink and grey Georgia marble, a limestone of shell and coral fragments and topped with eight stylised statues of herons. The Gothic windows have turquoise coloured designs of pelicans, flamingos, geese and other native wildlife. The garden around the tower are extensive and beautifully maintained, with streams, fern gardens, huge banks of rhododendrons and virtually every native species of Florida trees. A mirror lake provides a set piece view of the Tower.
The light coloured stone and delicate designs of the windows and ornamentation soften the sheer scale of the tower and give it an ethereal quality. But more remarkable still is that the tower contains a carillon of 60 bronze bells, cast by John Taylor Bell Foundry in Loughborough, England. A full-time carillonneur is retained and he plays a programme of music on the bells, which ring out eerily throughout the entire park. The clock plays a series of other tunes to mark the hours and half hours. The fifth floor of the tower contains the Anton Brees Carillon Library. Named after the tower’s first carillonneur from 1928 to 1967, it is the largest and most comprehensive carillon library in the world.
As if this were not remarkable enough, the view from the tower is stunning – well, stunning by Florida standards. You become so used to the flat landscape in Florida that even a modest hill (it’s not really a mountain) which gives a 360 degree panorama is stunning. It’s all relative.
Okeechobee
US 98 runs from just outside Sebring to Okeechobee, initially through citrus groves but these quickly give way to cattle pasture. This prepares you for Okeechobee, which is a cattle town through and through.
Around 6,000 people live in Okeechobee today, but in its early days it had ambitions to rival Chicago – it had the vast cattle plains and the industry that went with it, stock yards, rail road connections and was situated on a huge lake. The President of the East Coast Railroad, J.R. Parrott, had much the same vision and his name is plastered over the town’s main drag. The streets were built deliberately wider than normal to accommodate the horse and cart traffic that the achievement of this vision would entail. But it didn’t happen. Okeechobee didn’t even become the State capital and there are only a few remains of what was once the ambition – a huge park named after Flagler, the wide streets, the courthouse.
Okeechobee today relies on the cattle and dairy industries and it is the US's largest beef producer. Okeechobee's livestock market is the second largest in the country and ironically now far outstrips Chicago. This is probably quite a good time for the ranchers around here. I spoke to Al, who was painting a wall, and he told me that he farms 70 acres of beef cattle. Property prices have gone through the floor here as elsewhere in Florida, but his farm – which is tiny by Okeechobee standards – now gives him a good living because of the recent spike in beef prices. He's even considering giving up painting walls.
For more images, follow the link to Okeechobee
It is no surprise then to learn that the local rodeos are very popular and attract large crowds. So if you want western clothing and equipment, Okeechobee would be a good stop off; and the vast Eli's Western Store is probably where you'd be directed. This huge store supplies everything and anything the cowboy (and girl) needs: boots, hats, saddles, spurs, lassos, whips, belts, and every version of Wrangler provided it’s a boot cut. The selection of cowboy boots in Eli's just has to be seen to be believed. Glen Easterday, who lives in Okeechobee during the winter to avoid the snows of Circleville, Ohio, told me that he was there for the rodeos and cowboy life - and judging by the number of people in store he isn’t the only one.
For more images, follow the link to Eli's Western Store
The downtown shopping street, which runs alongside US 98 but is dominated by the huge highway which runs through the town has been revived, but it's not as attractive as some of the other towns.
Lake Okeechobee
Driving south from Okeechobee takes you round the rim of Lake Okeechobee. Sometimes referred to as Florida's inland sea, Lake Okeechobee is right in the middle of Florida’s agricultural belt, but in recent times has become famous for its amenities - fishing, boating and trails. The second-largest freshwater lake entirely within U.S. boundaries, it is contained by the Herbert Hoover Dike, built in 1928. Surrounding the dike, rich earth supports a lucrative sugarcane industry and roads through the flatland outskirts take you among the sweet crops and the towns that prosper from it. Waterways on either side run into the "Big O," as the lake is called, making it part of a152-mile boating passage way through the middle of the state known as the Okeechobee Waterway.
Because of the dam, the road runs lower than the water level and there aren't really many points at which you get a view of the lake. It's only when you turn into one of the parking lots at water level that the sheer size of Okeechobee become clear. I pulled into one of them and spent some time watching huge flocks of wading birds when this cardinal bird flew into a tree nearby.
This area is criss-crossed with rivers, creeks and canals, and it shows again the results of Florida's developers pitting themselves against its natural environment. I drove through Moore Haven, about 50 miles south of Okeechobee. This was a marsh between the Lake and the Caloosahatchee River before Hamilton Disston used steam dredgers to build a canal to connect the two bodies of water. This was part of his grand scheme in the 1880s for the Everglades Basin, but he followed many early Florida developers by going bankrupt and then went one stage further by dying mysteriously.
In the 1900s, a west coast developer called James Moore stepped into his shoes and decided to make a fortune selling Everglades land. He had a speedboat pick up prospective investors in Miami, shoot them through the Miami Canal and across Lake Okeechobee to reach Moore Have in time for a slap-up meal and enthusiastic sales pitch. Moore's skill seemed to be more along the lines of spending rather than hanging onto his money, but he managed to avoid bankruptcy and sold out.
One of his successor, Marion O'Brien quickly became of the area's largest landowners. As President of a local Bank, she inveigled a Tampa banker, Alonzo Clewis, to establish another settlement – quickly called Clewiston - down the lake from Moore Haven. Marion built a rickety rail road the 15 miles between the two towns. She ended up having to flee the area after outraging locals by hiring black workers on her farm. After her home was torched, she disappeared without trace.
Moore Haven was virtually wiped out by a hurricane in 1926, which forced waters from the Lake over the town. The story of the waters getting their own back on Florida's developers is a common one. Two years later the Hoover Dam was completed and, in spite of some alarming leaks discovered recently, seems to have done the job since then.
Clewiston
So on to Clewiston, which styles itself “America's Sweetest Town". Actually, the first sight as the town is approached is the huge smokestacks of the United State sugar Corporation, and pretty soon it's clear that the town’s fortunes depend on the local sugar cane.
Trucks hauling sugar cane rumble continuously through the town and I stopped for a train about 1 mile long, each truck full of the stuff. Tourists (of which more later) can even take a Sugarland Express tour of a local farm and mill (you even get to chew on some sugarcane) and the town throws an annual Sugar Festival in April and hosts guests at its historic circa-1938 Clewiston Inn. Herbert Hoover stayed here when he came to name the dam and it's touted as the best place in the area for a home-cooked Southern-style feast. There's not much competition, so that's probably correct. My quick inspection confirmed its status as a period piece.
VisitFlorida.com says that “Clewiston has the most to offer vacationers, especially those intent on hooking into the lake's legendary largemouth bass and speckled perch”. I was told that the fishing is spectacular - Blue gills, Okeechobee catfish and black crappies are other local catches - so I'm sure the last bit is correct, but I couldn't see what else Clewiston could offer visitors. The downtown is OK, but deserted. Thinking there must be more, I crossed the road and went into Clewiston's City Hall to ask for a map. A council worker told me a little about the town and then asked me to hang on while he fetched someone else. The Mayor quickly appeared to thank me personally for visiting the town. I detected a note of desperation in his voice.
The final comment has to be on the vast US Sugar Corporation plant. Why sugar refining should pump out so much smoke is beyond me. But this is the least of their sins. USSC has had a bad rap from environmentalists in recent years for polluting the Everglades and there's little doubt that runoffs of phosphorus used in fertilisers has been very harmful. We speak, of course, with the benefit of hindsight: USSC point out with some justification that nothing they did was illegal and, in any event, many of the canals on which they depend were built by the government. Nevertheless, they shelled out $300m in a 1994 deal to start cleaning up the Everglades.
In 2008 Florida’s Governor, Charlie Crist, announced a gigantic deal to buy USSC and swathes of Everglades land. But it was all too much for the State. In the end, what began two years ago as a stunning $1.75 billion purchase of the United States Sugar Corporation and all its assets, including 187,000 acres of land, closed in October 2010 at a fraction of its original size, with 26,790 acres being sold for $197 million. This all fell very short of what environmentalists wanted.
And so…
back to Fort Myers – and another world. Only 60 miles or so between the two towns and they could not be more different. Well, America is a land of contrasts, and that's one of the things that make the country so fascinating, but we forget that the differences are often very local. I met a lot of really friendly people on my trip, but I sensed they would feel out of place in Fort Myers, and particularly Naples, to which I drove wearily at the end of the trip. This is such a big country!
So what did I learn?
It was hardly a trip into the outback, but the central towns are very different if you’ve only experienced coastal or tourist Florida. There a real economy underpinning them and their character comes from the agriculture or industry that supports them. I had no idea that cattle tanching and beef [production in Florida is as big as it is. The people are great, they are friendly, proud of their communities and very proud to be cowboys or country people.
I learned that much of Florida’s recent past has been shaped by individual developers, whose vision normally exceeded their business skills and most seemed to end up bankrupt. There is a history of development boom and bust in Florida, which continues to this day. I learned that the towns are so recent that you can trace their establishment and growth to individuals who wanted to build them up and had great ambitions for their communities – much of it unrealised, but not all.
I learned that water vs. development is a dynamic not to be overlooked in Florida. Water, and its management in canals, creeks, lakes and rivers, has shaped the State. Developers have tried to tame the water to realise their own visions. Sometimes the water strikes back. I’d like to think that the Everglades might strike back at some point.