page_title: Winter Park, Florida
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Winter Park, Florida / History
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Lake Maitland from veranda of The Hotel Alabama, Winter Park, FL; from a c. 1922 postcard published by The Albertype Company. The hotel was converted to condominiums in 1980-1981.
context_page_description: Winter Park is a suburban city in Orange County, Florida, United States. The population was 27,852 at the 2010 United States Census. It is part of the Orlando–Kissimmee–Sanford, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.
  Winter Park was founded as a resort community by northern business magnates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its main street includes civic buildings, retail, art galleries, a private liberal arts college, museums, a park, a train station, a golf course country club, a historic cemetery, and a beach and boat launch.
context_section_description: The Winter Park area's first human residents were migrant Muscogee people who had earlier intermingled with the Choctaw and other indigenous people. In a process of ethnogenesis, the Native Americans formed a new culture which they called "Seminole", a derivative of the Mvskoke' (a Creek language) word simano-li, an adaptation of the Spanish cimarrón which means "wild" (in their case, "wild men"), or "runaway" [men].  The site was first inhabited by Europeans in 1858, when David Mizell Jr. bought an 8-acre (32,000 m²) homestead between Lakes Virginia, Mizell, and Berry. A settlement, called Lake View by the inhabitants, grew up around Mizell's plot. It got a post office and a new name—Osceola—in 1870.
  The area did not develop rapidly until 1880, when a South Florida Railroad track connecting Orlando and Sanford was laid a few miles west of Osceola. Shortly afterwards, Loring Chase came to Orange County from Chicago to recuperate from a lung disease. In his travels, he discovered the pretty group of lakes just east of the railbed. He enlisted a wealthy New Englander, Oliver E. Chapman, and they assembled a very large tract of land for $13,000 on July 4, 1881, upon which they planned the town of Winter Park. Over the next four years they plotted the town, opened streets, built a town hall and a store, planted orange trees, and required all buildings to meet stylistic and architectural standards. They promoted it heavily. During this time, the Winter Park Post Office opened, and the railroad constructed a depot, connected to Osceola by a dirt road.
  In 1885, a group of businessmen started the Winter Park Company and incorporated it with the Florida Legislature; Chase and Chapman sold the town to the new company. In a land bubble characteristic of Florida history, land prices soared from less than $2 per acre to over $200, with at least one sale recorded at $300 per acre.
  In 1885, the Congregational Assembly of Florida started Rollins College, the state's first four-year college. The following year the Seminole Hotel on Lake Osceola opened. This was a resort complete with the luxuries of the day: gas lights, steam heating, a string orchestra, a formal dining room, a bowling alley, and long covered porches.
caption: Veranda at the Hotel Alabama c.1922
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