>>This program is brough to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation a proud partner of WUCF, and the Central Florid Community.

>>Up next on this episode of Florida Road Trip... >>The population was growing.

People were being drawn here from all over because of farming and citrus opportunities.

>>We visit a central Florida community that was an agricultural hub, but was also the home to... >>At that time, it was one of the most technologically advanced hotels in the area.

>>Buckle up.

Florida Road Trip is back on the road.

♪♪♪ Hi there and welcome to Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais.

This week, we make a pit stop in the quaint community of Winter Garden, located 15 miles west of Orlando in Orange County.

Winter Garden is not only a desirable place to live, work and play, but a community that also attracts its fair share of visitors thanks to its relaxed lifestyle.

However, how did this historic city get its name?

Well, it's rooted in the garden.

>>City got its name through the fact that you could basically grow vegetables and citrus around here practically all year round.

People would come here to live and then write back home saying, "Yo could have a garden all winter.

You could grow things all winter."

Thus the name Winter Garden.

After most of the native Americans who lived around Lake Apopka were moved west under the Indian Removal Act, settlers who were essentially farmers began to arrive in the area in the 1850s and 1860s.

The muck land around the lake that attracted the Native Americans also attracted these farming settlers, and they realized they could grow just about anything around the lake.

>>In the late 1800s, only about 100 people lived in Winter Garden.

But the railroads were about to change all of that by offering farmers a faster way to get their products to market.

>>The Orange Belt Railway, which later became the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, ran right through the heart of Winter Garden.

So it was kind of a focal point for the downtown area.

We had passenger service, but the more important part was the freight service.

So this this area was known as one of the larger vegetable producing and citrus producing areas of the state.

When the railroads came through here and Winter Garden began to grow viably as a city, it was a boon to this area.

They ignited extreme growth.

>>Symbolizing the importance of the two railroads in Winter Garden, preservationists saved both the original train depots.

One houses the Central Florida Railroad Museum, while the other is home to the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation.

Early Winter Garden was mostly rural and at times a big adjustment for some of the new residents.

Rod Reeves grew up in Winter Garden and remembers his mother's account of he first reaction when she arrived as a young girl in 1913.

She got off the train here.

She was ten years old, and she said she knew she shouldn't have thought it, but she still thought, "Oh, mosquitoes, sand, sand, fleas, sand, spurs, heat."

She said, "Oh, Lord, I have died and gone to Hell."

>>The City of Winter Garden incorporated in 1908, with 191 residents.

A.B.

Newton became the first mayor.

>>A.B.

Newton was one of our founding fathers.

We call him Mister First.

He ended up being our first mayor when the city incorporated in 1908.

He was the first postmaster.

He was the first person to own a store on Plant Street.

He was also the first cashier for the First National Bank.

He had the first newspaper in town as well.

He did a lot of things first.

>>A.B.

Newton got the ball rolling, and by the 1920s, merchants started following the farmers and businesses lined Plant Street.

>>The population was growing.

People were being drawn here from all over because of farming and citrus opportunities.

You could say by the lat mid-to-late twenties, this town was on the map was something to really be proud of.

>>Winter Garden was built on the peel of an orange.

That's what people like to say.

>>Even though several freezes slowed the citru industry's growth, by the 1950s the citrus industry enjoyed a boom.

>>As more acres were devoted to orange growing, more and more people got involved.

It seems like in the Winter Garden area, you either owned thousands of acres of orange grove or worked for someone who owned thousands of acres of orange groves.

There were packing houses lined up along the railroad lines, which were working all through the season.

Anybody who needed a job could work in the parking industry, either in the fields or in the packing houses.

We were all about citrus.

>>In 1949, the Tavares and Gulf Railroad generated more perishable freight per mile of track than any class one road in the United States.

At one point, we wer rightly truthfully, the largest shipping center on the planet for citrus and vegetables.

More freight was out, came out of here on the two railroad lines than any other place on the planet.

>>When Highway 50 passed the outskirts of Winter Garden, businesses began leaving downtown.

In the 1980s, there were three big freezes that almost ended the citrus industry.

By the 1990s, downtown Winte Garden was almost a ghost town.

City leaders then got to work, turning the town around with new infrastructure while preserving its historic charm.

>>The Winter Garden that people are drawn to today I mean, hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world, they're amazed at how this town is preserved.

This town, luckily just preserved its architecture.

Those buildings stayed along Plant and Main Street.

Practically every one and owners used them for storage or warehousing.

But they didn't tear them down.

>>City of Winter Garden itself has done a fabulous job at revitalizing downtown Winter Garden.

It's a thriving area once again.

It's a hot spot.

>>It's not often you get to be a part of changing the community and to have seen it from the vibrant community it was when I was a kid to not so much, a blighted community, and then back to being so vibrant and full of youth and vitality is an incredible experience.

>>I think the town has always had a kindness.

And even today, I think that pervades.

There's a friendliness and and there's still there's a lot of that here.

>>What you see is what it was except updated.

People love that.

And Winter Garden now being on the map as a destination of historic preservation just draws those people who want to visit our shops and bask in the history that we've preserved.

♪♪♪ >>Many may believe that tourism first came to the are in the early 1970s with Disney.

Yet Winter Garden's been a hotbed for visitors since the 1920s.

>>People were making more money in the teens and early twenties.

There was prosperity.

Everybody could afford to drive on vacation.

They came to this area, particularly because of the publicity surrounding Lake Apopka, which was the largemouth bass capital of the world, as it turned out.

>>Lake Apopka was never a Silver Springs.

It was always a shallow lake, but it was full of fish.

Tourists came from all over and there were hundreds of boats there, and the city rented the boats for about $3 a day.

There wasn't a motor on it, it had oars, and you went out and you fish and they, they got great bass out of the lake, great speckled perch.

This was a tourist mecca because of Lake Apopka and the great fishing that was available to the tourists here.

>>The two-story Shelby Hotel was the only hotel in Winter Garden at the time.

The structure was nearly bursting at the seams, oftentimes running out of rooms for visitors.

Thus, construction began on a new, larger hotel, the Edgewater.

>>They had originally planned the hotel to be a four-story building.

This is back in 1923 and 1924.

The construction of it got as far as about the first floor.

And in the mid twenties, Florida had a land bust.

And the original company that began that construction went out of business.

So the hotel sat with its first floor constructed for a couple of years.

>>The Edgewater Hotel was a community project and my dad's real estate office was across the street and people would come into the office and they'd say, "Why should I buy property in this town when you can't even finish the hotel across the street?"

So him being in the real estate business, he was able to get a group of investors from Orlando to complete the hotel.

>>The Edgewater was a success and attracted guests like Clark Gable and Rod Serling, both who came to Winter Garden for the fishing.

>>In 1927, it was a big draw for people coming into the area here.

It was a big centerpiece to the Winter Garden downtown.

At that time, it was one of the most technologically advanced hotels in the area.

It had a full sprinkler system, which was something that was a new technological advancement of the day.

And there's also a fully operational, you know, manually operated Otis elevator, which we still have here now and operates the same way that it did in 1927.

>>As downtown Winter Garden began to decline in the late 1960s, the Edgewater Hotel closed in 1968.

It sat empty for some 50 years before a plan was put in place to remodel the hotel.

Staying true to its original design.

>>We had to go through the process of doing a complete historic restoration on the property so that when people came int the hotel, when we reopened it, that they would have a more authentic 1920s, 1930s experience.

Keeping the history of the hotel and the history of Winter Garden alive is our main objective.

When people come to the hotel that they have a sense of the past.

>>The Edgewater Hotel now operates as a bed and breakfast, but it still has a sink area designated for just cleaning your fish.

♪♪♪ You'll find hometown heroes in each of Florida's communities, and Winter Garden is no difference.

For the hometown heroes here who rose to the challenge during difficult times, they not only ushered in change locally, but also globally.

>>Flying Tigers.

The new American Air Force over China.

>>George McMillan was our hometown hero during World War Two.

He signed on with the Flying Tigers, an elite squadron of bombers who worked with the Chinese Air Force almost surreptitiously to, you know, in their struggle against Imperial Japan.

He flew a lot of missions, came back to Winter Garden a hero.

Parades and recognition, medals.

They gave him a watch at a special presentation at the Garden Theater.

And being a military guy at heart and really, really wanted to serve his country.

He signed on again and flew more missions over Southeast Asia and sadly, was shot down in 1944.

So Georg McMillan is very special to us.

>>He is our hero.

And it's kind of amazing because here he was from a prominent family.

They could have done anything he wanted to do, but he chose to to go and figh for the freedom of the country.

And I think that's remarkable, really.

>>Rod Reeve's father was on of the town barbers at the time and still remembers the effects that McMillan's death had on the community.

>>As a town barber, my dad cut everybody's hair from the time they were very young, you know, and he would come home and sit at the supper table and sometimes just put his head down between his hands and he'd cry.

And mother said, "What is it?"

He said, "Well, I lost another one of my boys today."

So it was very hard because he had known them since they were children and all the way up.

>>In 1937, a different kind of hero emerged in Winter Garden.

William Maxey, along with his wife Juanita, came from Daytona Beach to run the Winter Garden colored school.

He became the principal and his wife, a teacher.

>>William and Juanita Maxey, are what we call citizen heroes.

They came to the Winter Garden area to help educate the African-American kids of Winter Garden who are not getting the education they needed and deserved.

A little wooden school that the children did attend occasionally, a couple of days a week was eventually enlarged and upgraded by the Maxeys and the teachers they hired.

It kept expanding and expanding so that by 1957, we had a high school for African-American students called Drew High School on the east side of town.

They made sure these children had self-esteem, got an education, and they opened the doors for a lot of children.

>>William Maxey served as the principal for 28 years while his wife, Juanita, was a teacher for 45 years.

In 1965, the new William Maxey Elementary School was opened in Winter Garden, named in honor of the principal who succeeded at a difficult job in difficult times.

♪♪♪ Citrus became king, and downtown Winter Garden and saw a bold expansion in the 1950s.

For businessmen like Hoyle Pounds, they saw cars and tractors roll off their lot.

>>Mr.

Hoyle was a wonderful character, didn't say much and had you gone into LB Motors you would've thought he was one of the workers.

You never would have picked him out as the owner.

He had the Ford dealership here.

But I remember my dad, of course, was very poor as most people during the Depression and Mr.

Pound in the barber chair when he said, you need a car.

So you know Mr. Hoyle I do, he said, but I don't have any money.

Don't remember mentioning money.

Come get your car.

Pay me when you can.

>>His company was the largest case tractor dealership in the Southeast.

All agricultural tractors across the country had big rivets on their wheels.

They didn't have any rubber tire.

And when they crossed the road, it was a clay road.

Nobody cared.

But when they paved it, then everybody started caring.

So he developed this rubber tire.

It was not inflatable.

It was a solid rubber tire.

For a little town that's a big deal.

Further, serving his community, Hoyle Pounds became Winter Garden's fire chief, a volunteer job with no pay and a job he held for almost 40 years.

Another hot spot in downtown Winter Garden in the 1950s?

A.D. Mims' Barbershop.

>>Oh, good memories.

A.D. Mim's barbershop.

That' where I used to get my haircut.

A.D. Mims was the county commissioner for a number of years representing this district.

So if you want to talk to the county commissioner, you didn't call his office and his secretary.

You went to the barbershop.

Not always to get a haircut.

You just wanted to be sure he knew that your ditch needs to be cleaned out.

You know, we have today all these fancy commissioners with all these secretaries and everything.

They don't know half as much as A.D. Mims knew because he talked to the people every day.

And that was not all bad.

>>The Garden Theater also became a landmark here in downtown.

>>The Garden Theater is a special place to us.

It was built in 1935 and it was a major draw.

That place was 600 seats originally and just packed.

>>It was the first theater built for movies, for talkies in the thirties.

During the war it was an active place where you could come and get the newsreels and you could socialize with people.

And this was happening place of Winter Garden.

>>In the 1950s when Highway 50 came through on the outskirts of Winter Garden, the roadway began to lure businesses away from downtown.

Eventually, the downtown area started to struggle, and in 1963, the theater closed.

>>Hoyle Pounds next door, who had his tractor business and Ford dealership bought the theater when it closed in 1963.

Turns it into a warehouse, took everything out, straightened out the floor.

You wouldn't know it was a movie theater from inside.

And he used it for storage.

>>Years later, when Pounds Motors closed, the Heritage Foundation became instrumental in buying the theate and refurbishing the structure.

>>In a very short period of time, we transformed a very empty shell into a 299 seat performing arts center that was unlike anything in West Orange County.

>>When we went to reopen it, rehabilitate it in 2003, Irv Lipscomb, who's on our board, remember taking photographs in 1955 of the interior of the theater, he's movie buff.

So we use those photos to reproduce the inside of the theater, the Romeo and Juliet balconies.

The raked floor is back.

So what you see today is basically how it looked when it opened in 1935.

>>Today, the Winter Garden Theater is home to plays, concerts and movies.

When the theater reopened in 2008 following a large remodeling project, it served about 10,000 patrons annually.

Today, it serves more than 70,000.

>>We've been blessed with wonderful staff and support and a community that just happened to be, I think, ripe and ready for it and become the anchor tenant of downtown Winter Garden.

♪♪♪ >>The West Orange Trail runs right through the heart of downtown Winter Garden.

The project is just one credited with bringing people back.

>>And we are so fortunate to have the first mayor of Orange County and dedicated community servant Linda Chapin here with us right along the trail, the trail that you helped built.

Tell us when we go back in time after, let's say, the hard freezes and citrus was lost, what was happening here in West Orange County?

>>Well, unfortunately, Scott, after the freezes, the grove owners who had tried to replant after the first freeze gave up after the second freeze.

And so West Orange County began to decline.

The other thing, though, that happened to Winter Garden was that Highway 50 was built and all the downtown businesses moved out to be on the highway because that' where the people were going by.

And unfortunately, the old beautiful part o Winter Garden began to decline.

>>And where did this idea come from to create the West Orange Trail?

>>In the late eighties, ther was beginning to be a movement, a national movement in America called Rails to Trails.

And the idea was that you take all the abandoned railroad tracks and you convert them to hiking and biking pedestrian trails.

And so we glommed onto that idea and thought about Winter Garden, which had the old abandoned railroad tracks going righ through the middle of downtown.

>>Now, you said you thought about it, but a lot of other people thought negatively against us.

Tell us, how did you convert the naysayers?

Oh, you got a big grin on your face.

This is a great story.

What did you do to bring everybody in line for this amazing trail?

>>Well, don't talk about bringing people in line.

What I needed to do was convert them to the potential of a trail.

And so we put a lot of Winter Garden leaders and elected officials on a bus, and we drove them over to Saint Petersburg, where the first and only trail was already situated, the Pinellas Trail.

So we took them over to see this wonderful trail in Saint Petersburg, which when it was first talked about, had encountered a great deal of opposition over there, just like we were experiencing over here.

In fact, there was one very Ritzy subdivision that had protested loudly.

They didn't want people going close to their homes.

And so they built a big wall between their subdivision and the Pinellas Trail.

Well, by the time we got over there, Scott, they had all built doorways through the wall so they could reach the trail.

>>From their homes onto that trail.

>>Exactly.

>>It became an amenity, an asset.

>>And when they advertise their homes for sale later on, they said immediatel adjacent to the Pinellas Trail.

So we see what's happened here in Winter Garden, where the trail now goes through beautiful new subdivisions and homes and is just a very special part of West Orange County.

>>And let's talk about what did the trail do for West Orange County specifically for Winter Garden?

>>Well, in Winter Garden, once we had the trail established, there were, guess what?

People using it coming from Oakland through Winter Garden.

And that was pretty much the first couple of phases.

And so there were people downtown again.

The businesses started to come back.

The families who cared so much about Winter Garden, the Chicagoans, the Ropers, so many philanthropists who had lived there for years, 100 years or so, began to do important work in downtown Winter Garden.

And little by little, it became the beautiful, wonderful place it is today.

>>And the history of the trail is still being written.

Tell us a little bit about sun trails and how the trail is actually going to be connected to other trails around the state of Florida.

>>You know, we like to claim credit for having launched yet another movement, because when Senator Andy Gardner from central Florida was president of the Senate in Tallahassee, we talked about the trail.

He became excited about the idea of establishing more trails in central Florida, not just in central Florida, but beyond.

In fact, we became excited about connecting all the existing trails into a larger system, which is now called Sun Trails.

And the first one is the coast to coast trail from the Atlantic right through central Florida, over to the Gulf of Mexico.

The second one is being built up around the Saint John's River and Palatka and Saint Augustine.

And the third one is now being discussed.

And eventually the state of Florida, we hope, will be the hiking and biking and trails capital of America.

>>Mayor, if we were to step on the trail today, what are some of the amenities, some of the things we can do?

>>Well, of course you would see cyclists.

That's an important part.

But walkers, you know, pedestrian people getting their steps in.

People pushing baby carriages, rollerbladers, children who are able to go from their homes to their schools because of the trail.

>>We've talked about the trail going through West Orange County.

But I also feel like the trail goes through your heart.

Tell us a little bit about how the city seal in Winter Garden also changed.

>>The West Orange Trail is awfully important to me because so many people enjoy it.

And once we had converted the city officials to the idea and they became cheerleaders themselves one day in the late nineties, the mayor and the city manager showed up in my office, called for an appointment, and presented me with the artistic rendering of the new City Seal for Winter Garden, with the trail going right through downtown.

I love it so much.

I didn't take many things from my office home with me when I left Orange County, but that piece hangs in my bedroom.

I love it so much.

>>Mayor Linda Chapin, we are so grateful not only for you joining us here today, but everything that you have done to better life in central Florida.

Thank you so much.

>>It's been a pleasure, Scott.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ >>Well, that's going to do it for the Winter Garden edition of Florida Road Trip.

Thanks for joining us, everyone.

I'm Scott Fais.

I invite you to join us again next week as we continue our ride through Florida history.

Until then, safe travels.

♪♪♪ >>This program is brough to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation a proud partner of WUCF, and th Central Florida Community.