citruslandfl

The Altamonte Hotel, Orange County, Fla. (circa 1883) The time was 1920, June 18th to be exact, just as America’s notorious Roaring 20s and another state-wide land boom were just beginning. It was on that date that a number of well-respected residents of Altamonte Springs met “to take action”. The Orlando Sentinel of June 19th told of the event, “a Protest Against Neglect,” the newspaper said. Altamonte Springs citizens wanted a “Separation from Seminole County.” A new Seminole County in...

Oakland, Orange County, Florida By Richard Lee Cronin A quarter-century of history about the earliest days of the quaint little residential community of Oakland, West Orange County, Florida, has been largely forgotten. Typically thought of as a railroad town established by James G. Speer in 1886-87, a city that thereafter grew to become Orange County’s largest city of 400 residents in the 1890s, one could wrongly conclude that Oakland’s founding traces to that arrival in the 1880s of a...

The Great Sphinx, Cairo, Egypt Mysteries of an Age of Discovery Explorers traveled the globe long before the 20th century, but throughout much of the 1900s, a new and very different breed of curious adventurers began exploring the world. Young men and women cast caution aside to visit long-ignored mysterious corners of the world, doing so not to conquer new territories as earlier explorers did, but to simply view that which few others had ever laid eyes on or would ever see for themselves....