The legendary sheriff, who was killed in 1870 while trying to settle a dispute over the sale of two cows, is buried in a small family plot just beyond the entrance to what is now the Harry P. Leu Botanical Gardens in Orlando. Father and son are often confused in local histories, but it is the elder Mizell who was arguably Winter Park’s earliest nonnative pioneer. A few years later, Wilson Phelps of Chicago visited the area and was entranced by its thick woods and shimmering lakes. In 1874 he bought a sizable tract, including a large part of the Mizell homestead, built a rambling cracker farmhouse in the midst of a 60-acre grove and began selling lots to fellow Chicagoans. Wrote Phelps in 1874: “I found myself one beautiful afternoon on the east bank of Lake Osceola, and as I looked into its clear and crystal waters and caught glimpse through the forest of tall and graceful pines, of beautiful lakes Virginia and Maitland, and seeing that the soil was good, I exclaimed in an outburst of enthusiasm to my son, ‘Here is the spot I have been looking for and here if anywhere must be my future home.” Interestingly, part of the Phelps home survives as a wing of the Queen Anne-style Comstock-Harris House, otherwise known as Eastbank. It was built in 1883 by William Comstock, a wealthy grain merchant who also hailed from the Windy City. Eastbank, on Bonita Drive, is today the city’s oldest home, and one of only three listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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NORTHERN EXPOSURE The 1880s were pivotal years that saw the reshaping of a haphazard frontier settlement into what today would be called a master-planned community. A major catalyst was completion in 1880 of the South Florida Railroad, which connected Sanford with Orlando and continued through to Tampa. The effort to snare the state’s first post-Civil War rail line was led by developer Edward Henck, one of Longwood’s first settlers and a tireless advocate of the town’s growth. The project was bankrolled by R.M. Pulsifer of Pulsifer & Company, owner of the Boston Herald, whom Henck had personally solicited for support. But it wasn’t Longwood that fired the imagination of Loring Chase, a New Hampshire native who was raised in Massachusetts and lived in Chicago. Harsh winters didn’t agree with the hard-working real estate broker, whose doctors had advised him to seek a warmer climate to alleviate his chronic respiratory problems. Chase, who first visited the area in February 1881, was particularly smitten by the land surrounding lakes Osceola and Virginia. “Never will the delightful impression of that first visit be obliterated from my mind,” he recalled in a speech 10 years later. “Before me lay these beautiful rolling plains, covered everywhere by majestic pines, forming, not an impenetrable forest but a vast grove through which we could drive our team at will.”
COURTESY OF THE WINTER PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY/RESTORATION BY WILL SETZER AT CIRCLE 7 STUDIO
The nerve center of early Winter Park was the Pioneer Store, with John Ergood and Robert White as proprietors. The second floor of the generalmerchandise emporium was used for social functions, church meetings and civic gatherings. As a result, locals soon began referring to the first-floor general mercantile store as Ergood & White and to the building in its entirety as Ergood’s Hall. It’s the location where Winter Park citizens, after much controversy, voted to incorporate as a town.
