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Florida Road Trip
Winter Park Producer's Cut
Special | 37m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
Take an extended journey through history in Winter Park.
On this Producer's Cut of Florida Road Trip, we explore the history of Winter Park. We’ll explore several museums including The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens and the Rollins Museum of Art. We also make a pit stop at Rollins College. Join us for the ride on this extended version of the Florida Road Trip Winter Park episode.
Florida Road Trip is a local public television program presented by WUCF
Watch additional episodes of Florida Road Trip at https://video.wucftv.org/show/central-florida-roadtrip/
Florida Road Trip
Winter Park Producer's Cut
Special | 37m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
On this Producer's Cut of Florida Road Trip, we explore the history of Winter Park. We’ll explore several museums including The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens and the Rollins Museum of Art. We also make a pit stop at Rollins College. Join us for the ride on this extended version of the Florida Road Trip Winter Park episode.
How to Watch Florida Road Trip
Florida Road Trip is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship>>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.
>>Coming up on this edition of Florida Road Trip... >>I think everybody that comes here can find a little bit of something that will be interesting for them.
>>We visit a central Florida community that's only ten square mile and packed with Florida history.
It's home to the state's first institution of higher learning and the most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany Art.
>>We actually have some of the best arts and culture in Florida, but I'd argue actually in the United States.
>>Buckle up.
Florida Road Trip is back on the road.
♪♪ Hello and thanks for joining us for Florida Road Trip, I'm Scott Fais.
Chances are if you've ever visited Winter Park, you've likely strolled Park Avenue, home to its many restaurants and shops.
Just across the street is Central Park, a space that played a role in how the city got its name.
You see, when Northerners would come down to escape the winter months, they would enjoy time around a park, much like the one they might have had back home.
>>Our history as Winter Park gets started in really 1885 when Loring A.
Chase actually arrived.
He was businessman.
And like many Chicagoans during that period, he started suffering chronic bronchiti and chronic breathing problems.
The fashionable cure of the day was to send everybody to Florida.
They thought that the warmth and the heat was what was actually curative, when in reality just not being surrounded by, you know, 1800s smog is probably what helped that more than anything else.
>>Loring was a real estate broker from Chicago, and because he was in real estate he had a really good eye for real estate and development and he started to have a vision of what this town could be.
And he had a friend of his fro childhood named Oliver Chapman.
He started telling him about this beautiful area that he found and how cool it would be to create this winter area for wealthy northerners to come down.
They came into town and Loring didn't have the funds to be able to purchase land, but Oliver did.
So they together bought 600 acres of land for $13,000 and started creating a town.
>>And it was bounded on the north by Lake Maitland, on the south by Lake Virginia, on the east by Lake Osceola, and on the west by Lake Killarney.
>>Like many areas in Florida, we changed our name a few times along the way, an our original name was Lakeview, and that was given by a homesteader named David Mizell in 1858.
And then we changed the name to Osceola in 1870.
And that was in honor of Chief Osceola.
>>It was actually renamed by Loring A.
Chase and Oliver Chapman to be Winter Park for actually the Central Par that they were trying to create.
And the fact that they wanted peopl to come here during the winters.
So, kind of sort of moved laterally as far as marketing is concerned.
What's very interesting and pretty actually historically unique about Winter Park is that it is a reconstruction town that was designed to actually have African-American propert ownership built into the design.
>>What they did was they created an area on the west side of town, and they named it Hannibal Square.
This created their walk to work force.
And the gentleman, they would work in the orange groves or the packing plants.
They would help clear land, they would build homes, they would build buildings on Park Avenue, and they would work in the hotels.
>>The original vot to incorporate the town in 1887 failed.
>>When it came time to incorporate, the grand majority of voters here in Winter Park were African-American.
And as you can imagine even during Reconstruction U.S. history, there were people in Winter Park that did not want African-Americans to be able to vote.
So they did intimidate th the African-American West Siders to not come across the railroad tracks because they were holding the vote at night.
>>White residents living in the area did not want Hannibal Square included in the town limit.
They felt that they did not want black people making any laws or rules that white people had to be regulated by.
In fact, the vote to incorporate was first scheduled for July 1887, which would mean that Winter Park would have been incorporated just days before Eatonville.
But because of that conflict and when the July vote came up and the people showed up on the Park Avenue to vote, they didn't have a quorum.
That's when Gus Henderson came in.
He went around to the businesses, the churches and the homes and told the people, you know, you need to get ou and go and vote to incorporate.
On October the 12th, Gus led the residents of Hannibal Square across the railroad trac to the corner of Park and Morse.
>>This vote to incorporate passed.
>>So without West Side Winte Park, Winter Park wouldn't exist at all.
>>The railroad coming through town was an influential component as the tracks led to bringing in goods, services, and people in and out of the area.
Meanwhile, the canal system became just as important.
>>The canals were actually cut by people who were routing logging mills in the local area.
And they were cutting these canals between these lakes.
>>There was a lot of logging happening in this area because there was so much growth that was starting to happen.
>>It very quickly pivoted as early as the early 1900s into being kind of a scenic tourism attraction.
So people would actually take canoes and go through these canals.
>>Who knew that creating the canal system would also create the oldest-running business that we have in Winter Park today which is the Winter Park scenic boat tour.
It started in 1938 and it's one of the most fun ways to experience our city.
>>And while Winter Park has changed over the years, it's kept its character.
>>When people come into the museum, a lot of times they'll say gosh, Winter Park feels so different than the rest of central Florida and a lot of that is because of its history.
And our city and our community work really hard to maintain that same blueprint and that same sense of scale that we have that provides an intimate feel to our city.
♪♪ >>The western side of Winter Park, known as Hannibal Square, played a pivotal rol in Winter Park becoming a town.
And once again, it was Hannibal Square that played a role in Winter Park, becoming a city.
When Winter Park incorporated as a town, aldermen were elected to represent the people.
Two black men from Hannibal Square were elected: Walter Benjamin Simpson and Frank R. Israel.
>>Every time they came up for election, they were reelected.
The whites went to the Florida legislature and asked them to remove Hannibal Square from the tow limits and order a new election.
In May of 1893, the legislature and the governor sent down that order removing Hannibal Square from the town limits and ordering a new election.
>>Fast forward several decades later.
Hannibal Square's separation from the town of Winter Park came back into focus as the town's new leadershi wanted to incorporate as a city.
But there was a problem.
>>They did not have the population numbers to justify incorporating as the city in 1925 unless they actually reincorporated Hannibal Square back into Winter Park, which brought it back to its original borders.
So that is actually how Winter Park became a city, is it had to learn its lesson twice.
>>And ever since, Hannibal Square has remained parts of Winter Park.
>>I think the most unique thing about Hannibal Square is this Heritage Center.
>>The Hannibal Square Heritage Center offers visitors an opportunity to walk through history and read the stories of the community from those with first person knowledge.
Organizers started collecting photos in 2001 and now have more than 200 in the collection.
>>If you look at one of the photographs, you'll see in the lower righ hand corner there's a photograph of a person.
And then in the main part, you see a picture about someone or somebody or someplace in the community.
So it's not my story.
It's the story of the person who brought that photograph to us.
And we won't put up a picture if you don't know who it is.
I really wish people would come out to these events, to the Folk Art Festival, to the MLK celebration, to the Juneteenth to come to the Heritage Center, learn about the people who used to live where you're living.
♪♪ >>Wove into the early history of Winter Park is Florida's first college: Rollins.
Initially, there were discussions of locating campus in the Daytona Beach area and further north in Jacksonville.
Yet the college planted root right here and the up and coming community of Winter Park.
>>One of the things that I think is just very endearing is that Rollins started just three years after Winter Park was started and when the opportunity came about for Florida to have its first college, the people in Winter Park jumped on the opportunity.
>>The Congregational Church of the Central Florida area had this idea, or specifically Lucy Cross, who was an active member of the church and a teacher in Daytona area.
She thought Florida residents deserved a higher education that resembled her New England education, and the Winter Park community decided that Reverend Hooker, who was new, would be the one to lead this charge.
Then there was a competition suddenly, and there was a decision about where Congregationalist Church College would go in Florida.
Lucy was from the Daytona area, she was hoping Daytona.
There was also the idea of Jacksonville, Orange City and the Winter Park area as well.
and so, there was a financial competition.
And that's where real estate comes in, because there was an individual named Frederick Lyman who was a developer here, friends with Chase and Chapman, the founders of Winter Park and he was the President of Winter Park Land Company.
Eventually, we happened to have Rollins in Winter Park because they raised the most money by a landslide.
Over $110,000 back in 1885.
Alonzo Rollins is the reason why we were able to have the highest bid.
He contributed over $50,000 in property, mostly orange groves in the central Florida area.
Because he gave the most wa promised the name of the school.
>>They were in it because they really believed in creating this community.
And in times where Rollins suffered and they almost closed their doors, the same group of people came together and they invested in it so that it would continue.
And without that suppor in those early years especially, it'd be a very different story today.
>>Many notable people walked the campus of Rollins College over the years as students, visitors, or College Presidents.
>>Hamilton Holt was a belove and long-time College President from 1925 to 1949.
And he was kind of who put Rollins on the map.
He ended up bringing John Dewy to campus who was a leader in education at the time, in the 30s.
And they completely revised the Rollins curriculum to transition from a classica kind of lecture-style with very traditional courses to something completely different that focused on a conference room style model where discussion was kind of where the learning happened.
and where students engage with each other and with faculty in kind of this circular convers >>You might recognize the names of students who attended Rollins, like actor Buddy Ebsen, who appeared in TV's The Beverly Hillbillies and The Wizard of Oz.
Anthony Perkins, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Dana Ivey, a five time Tony Award nominee for her work on Broadway.
Yet one of the most notable is Fred Rogers.
>>He was a transfer student an he came for the music program.
As many students who had music careers after Rollins did.
And he met his wife here at Rollins.
>>Everyone knows Mister Rogers is a wonderful person, but what you saw is the Fred that we knew, too.
He was maybe the best listener I've ever been around.
When you were talking, and sometimes you almost felt awkward because he was so centere into what you were going to say and he was a listener.
And then he would respond.
And he also had this ability to grab a variety of input and then come out with the most brilliant, brilliant concept.
Just I can't say enough.
I miss him.
I miss him so much.
>>It's really nice to think about Rollins influencing Fred's career because he had such an impact on children and the nation.
He talks about a sign he saw on campus.
We still have it as part of our Mister Rogers Walking tour and it says life is for service.
And I think this is kind of what we hope students can embody when they're student learners here, that they're contributing to something greater.
>>In honor of Fred Rogers, the college installed this statue on campus in 2021.
It might have been a rainy day, but still a beautiful day in this neighborhood.
>>You can explore the neighborhood that made such a profound impact on the life of Fred Rogers right here on Rollins campus.
There is a walking tou that's available for everybody.
In fact, today we're fortunat enough to have Jo Marie Hebeler from Rollins College joining us here to tell us a little bit more of what to expect.
Jo Marie, thank you so much for joining us.
We're here in front of the library.
What awaits inside?
>>This is Stop One of the Mister Rogers self-guided walking tours.
And really Monday through Friday, 10 to 4 people can come and take the tour.
And now it is even in audio.
You can download the podcas wherever you get your podcasts.
And even though it's self-guided, you can listen along to all five stops here at the Olin Library where it starts.
You can pick up a map and you can follow along.
In the month of March, we keep the sweater and sneakers out right here in the lobby for everyone for Mister Rogers' birthday.
But all other times you can email or call the archives and they'll take out the sweater and sneakers for you.
There's other memorabilia, his yearbook, letters that he wrote to the college, pictures of his wife, whom he met here.
Just so much such a wealth of treasures.
>>Jo Marie in the middle of this beautiful Spanish Mediterranean hallway we find this plaque right here that means so much to Fred Rogers.
Tell us about it.
>>Yes.
This marble plaque was here when Fred was a student and he used to pass by it all the time.
And it influenced his lif so much so that he had a photo of this saying in his wallet for the rest of his life.
>>And this hallway here and the plaque are accessible to everybody.
>>Yes.
The entire self-guide walking tour is ADA accessible.
>>Phenomenal.
All right.
Let' go check out Stop number three.
And there it is, Mr. Rogers' stone, right here on the Rollins College Walk of Fame.
Tell us just a little bit about the significance of the stone that's inside the stone.
>>That embedded stone is from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Fred Rogers was born.
And this monument was dedicated in 1991 when Fred came back to Rollins for his 40th college reunion.
>>An how apropos that it's right here in front of Lyman Hall, which was his residence hall.
>>It is.
It is.
It's just perfect.
And he's nestled in here with historical figures from all over the world, from Mozart to Alexander Hamilton to Socrates.
You can find it all here on the Walk of Fame.
>>And this is an honor that the sitting presidents of Rollins College bestows upon all of these different great leaders and minds.
>>Yes, Hamilton Holt starte this when he was our president.
He's still one of our most renowned presidents.
And he had a similar walk at his ancestral home.
And he brought it to Rollins and started this.
And it built from there to over 500 stones now.
>>And this beautiful Hall of Fame is right here on the perimeter of Mills Lawn in the heart of campus.
Stop Four on the tour is the Tiedtke Concert Hall.
And inside there is an amazing portraits of Mr. Rogers that for somebody who grew up watching Mister Rogers on television, his attire just speaks to me.
>>Yes, he's wearing his iconic red sweater, putting on his blue sneakers.
And we just we love this portrait of him.
It was painted by Don Sondag, a local artist that's very famous for portraits.
And the pictures of canals here in Winter Park.
>>You can almost hear hi singing as he's putting on his sneakers to begin Mister Rogers neighborhood.
It is absolutely beautiful.
>>Yeah.
And sometimes you will hear singing when you come into the concert hall.
Students are doing recitals an practicing throughout the day.
>>It's always a beautiful day for a neighbor, and that is the name of this incredible piece of work right here beyond the Rose Garden.
Jo Marie, tell us a little bit about how special this is.
>>This beautiful bronze sculpture is our most significant dedication to Mister Rogers yet, and it's something we have been planning for a long, long time.
>>And there's a lot of hidden treasures embedded inside the statue.
We see Daniel Tiger on his hand there.
There are seven different children.
But then what is on the soul of all their feet?
>>There's the number 143.
And for Mr. Rogers that signified.
I love you.
>>The letters.
>>The letters, the number of letters-- >>This is an all-inclusive piece of writing because we hav the child here in a wheelchair.
>>He's in a wheelchair.
And then the back of his chair is this beautiful castle with many of the characters that were on the Mister Roger neighborhood television series.
>>Absolutely.
So many of these characters are literally right her just coming out of the facade.
>>Yes.
King Friday, X the Owl, Lady Elaine Fairchild and more.
They're all right here.
>>What an amazing, amazing piece of art right here in the middle of campus.
>>Yes.
>>Jo Marie Hebeler thank you s much for the great guided tour.
I've been fortunate to call Central Florida, home for more than 20 years and never did I expect that there is this much history right here on the campus of Rollins College.
♪♪ From museums to festivals to performances, Winter Park is a community that is in love with its art scene.
Although the city is smaller in size, it has a big history of embracing culture.
>>Winter Park is only ten square miles, and within the ten square miles we have over 20 arts and culture organizations just in our city limits.
There is something for everyone here in Winter Park, whether it's visual arts, performing arts, fine arts, or even public art.
We have world class museums throughout the city and we also have educational opportunities in case you want to learn a new talent.
>>One of those museums is the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.
Before its location here along Park Avenue, the museum first opened in 1942 on Rollins campus, where it was known as the Morse Gallery of Art.
>>One of the things that I love about the museum and its history is the story of Hugh McKean.
>>Hugh McKean was a former president of Rollins College and the husband to Jeannette Genius McKean whose grandfather was Charles Hosmer Morse.
>>But he had this connection to Tiffany and Laurelton Hall because when he was a youn artist, he went there to study.
And so he had spent time with Louis Tiffany and was so impressed by Laurelton Hall that when he got word that it had burned down in the late 1950s, he and his wife went there and saved every part of it.
>>Laurelton Hall was the dream home of Tiffany that he built for himself in New York.
Today, the Morse Museum has one of its wings named Laurelton Hall as well.
>>These are the most personal things that belonged to Tiffany an some of his greatest creations.
>>You'll find more tha the typical Tiffany lamps here.
>>Ther are things like fireplace hoods that are made of iron.
And when you look at them, they're a very unique part of what he created.
>>Also unique, this Tiffany Chape that the museum debuted in 1999.
But it has quite the history.
The chapel was created in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition, and it proved so popular that Tiffany brought it back t New York and put it on display.
Its popularity grew again and it was purchased and donated to the cathedral Saint John, the Divine.
Eventually, the structure was abandoned and Tiffany brought the chapel back to his home.
It stayed there unti the McKeans went and rescued it.
Everything that you see here could have been lost.
And really, it's it's a miracle that it didn't.
>>There's more than Tiffany on display here.
Other objects include glass, pottery, furniture and paintings.
Generally what we are is a period museum.
And so our works really date between the years of 1860 until about 1930.
We have probably about 13,000 objects.
>>Yeah, 13,000 is a lot.
Yet you don't need to clear your calendar for the entire day to explore all the pieces.
>>We're a very unusual museum in that we don't bring in traveling exhibitions, we do rotate our objects.
>>The old art gallery is still here.
After an expansion and renovation, it reopened to the public in 1978.
>>The collection of Rollins started back in the 1930s with some gifts of old masters and continued to grow through the 20th century.
Right now we are at about a little bit more than 6,000 works of art in the collection, and it spans the centuries with really strong collections in European old masters, American art and global contemporary art.
What's unique about the Rollins Museum of Art is that it is part of a college, we're the only one in our community to be part of a university or college.
And that means that our mission is very squarely centered on learning and on accessibility.
So everything we do, we do with that in mind, and we program the same way for our students as for our community.
So there's a different approach to art.
There's a different approach to learning, which has to do with the values of a liberal arts education.
>>That missio is just one of four components, making the Rollins Museum of Art unique.
It's the only museum in the area to collect European art pieces and paintings from the old masters.
It offers Spanish programing by the curator monthly and a significant part of the collection of contemporary art is on display inside the Alfond Inn.
>>We encourage dialo with the art and we look at art as a window onto larger conversations.
We encourage people to come at art from different points of view, encourage different and multiple perspectives so we can expand the dialog and engage people who are not necessarily museum goers.
>>The best part?
You don't have to be a student, a member of staff or an alum of Rollins to check out the museum.
It's free.
>>Come here give me a hug it's so good to see you.
How are you?
Come in!
Take a chair, there's some chairs, you can take a chair and sit in it.
>>If you're performing arts fan, you can still see a live production inside the Annie Russell Theater on Rollins campus.
The theater was built in 1932, and it is the oldest continuously operating theater in the state of Florida.
Not even a global pandemic could cut a performance.
>>It was a gift of friendship from Mary Curtis Bok Zimbalist who lived here in Winter Park.
>>That friend was Annie Russell, who at the time was a working actor in London and New York, where she gained a great reputation.
>>She wooed Annie Russell to come and retire in Winter Park by saying there's this nascent college and I want to build a theate and I want to name it after you and I want you to run it until you're really retired.
That's an amazing story that she came here and Annie was the first me, sort of choosing the plays that they did.
She also appeared in plays.
So the fact that it started as a gift of friendship has always impacted me.
For a long time, for decades, the Annie was the only game in town.
If you wanted to see a pla and you didn't go into Orlando.
We were it.
>>Right next door to the Annie Russell Theater is the Knowles Memorial Chapel were the area' first Bach Festival took place.
>>We started in 1935, right here in this building, and to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the passing of J.S.
Bach, it was so popular the first year they decided we need to keep doing it.
>>And keep it going they did.
It's the third oldest continuously running Bach Festival.
And if you've never been... >>We are a completely volunteer chorus and we bring in the world's greatest oratorio singers, soloists from around around the globe.
This is one of the most fascinating things for me.
We're not a only Central Florida choir.
They traveled from 11 counties.
They're from all walks of life, and we have physicians,, attorneys, professors, engineers.
We usually sing with around 180 people, that's a full-sized orchestra, and it is one of the few places in the country where you can hear these grea masterwork - choral masterworks performed regularly.
We know that over 30% of our population, our people who attend our concerts, come from outside the five county area.
>>And speaking of festivals, you may have heard of a few festivals hosted by the City of Winter Park.
>>The first one is the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival that's held every year in the spring, actually in March.
And the second one is our Autumn Art Festival that's held in the fall.
>>These festivals bring close to 300,000 people annually to the area.
>>We have 30,000 people that live here and they choose to live here not just because of how wonderful the city is, but also because the arts and culture life.
And then thousands more vacation here for that same reason.
>>I think that when you think about central Florida as a whole, there's a misperception that there's a lack of arts and culture.
And Winter Park really closes the gap on that and provides an opportunity for our community to experience arts and culture with our museums, our beautiful library, our events center, our lakes and our parks, and so much more.
♪♪ >>Tucked off on of the curves of State Road 426 in Winter Park, you'll discover the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens.
This hidden gem was once home to an artist whose personal story is one of perseverance and inspiration.
>>Albin Polasek was born in Moravia in 1879.
He came to the United States in 1901.
>>Polasek got his start in a small Minnesota town working at an alter carving factory.
It was here where he realized the need for a proper art education to advance his career.
His schooling paved the way for becoming the head of the sculpture departmen at the Art Institute in Chicago.
In Chicago, he met Ruth Sherwood, who would later become his wife.
They both retired and then moved to the Winter Park area.
>>He moved in on New Year's Day, 1950, and eight months later he had a very severe stroke and it left the left sid of his body somewhat paralyzed.
And from that time on, he tried sometime to walk, but his leg wasn't stable enough, so he was in a wheelchair from that time forward.
>>Exploring his property at Winter Park, you can see he didn't allow his challenges with mobility to sidetrack his work.
>>We have dozens of art pieces all through the gardens.
And probably the ones that stand out to people would be "Man carving his own destiny."
There's a large limeston version of it that's out front, and he did that in this wheelchair wit only the use of his right hand.
He had an assistant that he would have do the tapping, and he did the carving.
>>Polasek carved this piec nearly 40 times, all with slight variations because he felt it symbolized him.
Several of his sculptures had personal ties, including this one "Primeval struggle."
>>He did that for his hometown in what's now the Czech Republic.
And it was to symbolize the victory of the people of that part of the world over the German army.
And the German army is portrayed as the wolf.
And the man is taking care of it.
>>Only 20-30% of his commissioned work were for churches.
But sometimes, he would keep a copy for himself and thankfully you will find many here inside his home including the Victoria's Christ >>Most crucifixes that depict Christ, it's Christ in death with his head hanging down and Polasek felt very strongly that the strength of Christ was his belief in what he was doing.
He chose to depict him as being victorious and saying to his Father that he was prepared to do everything, including die so that the world would be a better place.
>>Following his death in 1965, he was buried in Winter Park's Palms Cemetery, right alongside Ruth.
He was inducted to the National Academy of Design and the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
His home and gardens are now a snapshot in time, welcoming visitors wit more than 200 pieces on display.
>>And he was dedicated every day to making things beautiful for other people.
He came to this country with nothing and he carved his own destiny through hard work and perseverance.
♪♪ >>Not fa from the streets of Winter Park, you'll find the city of Ovied known for its roaming chickens.
Winter Park also had a flock of feathered friends that would roam these cobblestone streets.
And although they've been relocated, you can still see their influence everywhere.
>>As you travel through the city, you may not know it first and you may not see it first.
But as you're here for more days and others, you might start seeing peacocks in different ways.
You might see them on our manhole covers, you'll see them a peacock head on the street signs.
You'll see large murals at our Winter Park village.
>>The fascination with peacocks in Winter Park can be traced back to former Rollins President Hugh McKean and his wife, Jeanette.
>>They were visiting Asia and saw a creature called a peacock, and he loved them and ordered a couple of them and they brought them and and set them free out on Wind Song and they reproduced and there was a huge population of them.
And of cours they'd wander off the property.
The town kind of became known for the peacocks.
>>The birds are still located at the Genius preserve.
The land was once owned by Jeanette McKean's grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse.
Her father, Dr. Richard Genius, built a Spanish style home there named Wind Song in 1936.
Hugh and Jeanette lived in the home located on the Eastern Shore, Lake Virginia, just across from Rollins College.
Today, the public can visit the preserve and see the peacocks only once a year during the annual Run for the Trees 5K footrace.
>>In 2004, one of the things that the city commission first asked when I came on board as director communications was to develop and design a new city seal.
The old seal that we had was very much dated, and the colors and the themes that were in there were still important, but didn't quite reflec who the City of Winter Park was.
But the new seal that we have now that showcases the peacock, it also was inspired by the Tiffany glass that is found at the Morse Museum.
At the same time, we also adopted the slogan tagline, actually, that was the "City of Culture and Heritage."
And you'll see that underneath the peacock city seal as well.
It's very nice to see other organizations and companies who want to relate to Winter Park using elements of the peacoc in order to brand and associate with the City of Winter Park.
>>Well, now I better understand this peacock fountain here in downtown.
And I hope you learned something along the way during our ride through Winter Park.
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Florida Road Trip.
I'm Scott Fais, I hope you'll join us again next week as we discover more of the history here in Florida that surrounds us all.
Safe travels, everyone.
♪♪ >>This program is brought to yo in part by the Paul B.
Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and th Central Florida Community.
Florida Road Trip is a local public television program presented by WUCF
Watch additional episodes of Florida Road Trip at https://video.wucftv.org/show/central-florida-roadtrip/