"The Run to Eustis"

Ocklawaha Hotel #2, Eustis, Florida, circa 1914

A caravan of horseless carriages, on the morning of 1 September 1914, departed the headquarters of The Tampa Times in downtown Tampa and embarked on a historic Florida road trip. The Times newspaper headlined their report on the parade of vehicles as “The Run to Eustis.” Now, 120 plus years later, this seemingly trivial event appears to have been forgotten to history, but it was a very special day for Florida’s Enchanting Golden Triangle, one that should forever be remembered.

“The cars, each filled with “Good Road” enthusiasts, left the Times office at 10 o’clock,” reported the Tampa Times. Four of the vehicles originated there in Tampa; whereas many of the other cars had arrived the prior night: three coming from the town of Parrish, another three from Sarasota, and one from the town of Palmetto.

The lead car carried the Sarasota gentlemen, their car driven by that town’s newspaper editor, Rube Allyn. “From the minute Rube Allyn arrived in town last night until the last boy cheered the departing motorists this morning,” said the Times, “Tampa contained more good road enthusiasm than it has had in a long time.” Other Sarasota citizens traveling with Mr. Allyn were Sarasota’s Mayor, Dr. Jack Halton, and F. M. Gunther.

Behind Rube Allyn’s automobile were four Tampa gentlemen. Ike Craft of Florida Auto & Gas Co., Charles E. Tufts, formerly from Orange County but in 1914 was a lumberman from the nearby town of Harney, and Morris Lucas.

In another car was C. P. Parrish, “the daddy of the town of Parrish,” reported the Times, who was “riding with his nephew, M. K. Parrish, County Commissioner Murdock Mathewson, T Kersey and Wesley Williams.”

Most everyone in the caravan was a prominent citizen in the town they represented, but one individual in the party stood out far more like a special “guest of honor” than the others. And they all knew it! Augustus S. Pendry did not drive and had travelled from Bradenton to Tampa in hopes of hitching a ride. Frank M. Thomas, of the Florida Publicity Bureau, had ample room in his glitzy Lozier Six, and was thrilled to offer the 71-year-old Bradenton Hotel proprietor a ride. Even the Tampa Times realized the significance of having the “Father of Pendryville” as a member of the 1914 Run to Eustis.

Fifty Miles in One Day

The Eustis bound caravan met additional vehicles at Six Mile Creek, where Manatee County’s Ed Scott, President of the DeSota County Good Roads Association, and others from Arcadia and Fort Meade, awaited their arrival. Lunch was served in Bartow.

Locals escorted the caravan through Plant City and Lakeland before the Good Roads folks, as The Times reported, “proceeded on toward Winter Haven, Lucerne Park, Haines City, Loughman, Kissimmee, Lockhart, Apopka, Plymouth, Zellwood, Tangerine, Mount Dora, and Eustis.” The itinerary called for the caravan to arrive at the Ocklawaha Hotel in Eustis for a late dinner along with a welcoming celebration for the visiting residents from around the State.

More than a joy ride for auto enthusiasts, Lake County was to be the site of a Good Roads event on 2 September 1914. Selected for a good reason, Floridians from around the State came to see firsthand the roads that were being proclaimed as some of the best in the State.

Good Roads enthusiasts were given literature about Lake County’s “sand-oil” roads prior to being escorted over a stretch of roadway. “This ride convinced the visitors,” reported the Weekly Tribune of 10 September 1914, “that sand-oil road is the thing for country highways in Florida.”

“Back in 1876,” continued the Tribune’s report on the gathering of Good Roads enthusiasts in Eustis, “A. S. Pendry felled the first tree at Eustis and built the first house, and Mr. Pendry, being the father of the town, was called upon to speak. His speech was made on the spot where he first settled.”

Florida’s Good Roads Boosters at Ocklawaha Hotel, Eustis, Florida

A Founding Father’s Homecoming

Thirty-eight years after clearing land fronting Lake Eustis to build the Ocklawaha Hotel, Augustus Sawyer Pendry returned to his once-upon-a-time town of Pendryville to find little remaining of the town he had created. With his beloved wife Olivia (Ennis) Pendry (1846-1911), the two established a resort in the wilderness, but even the hotel they built had since been replaced by a newer version of the Ocklawaha.

Pendry’s Ocklawaha (above); Lane’s Ocklawaha (below)

Olivia Street, a main artery named by Pendry for his now deceased wife, had been renamed Center Street. Even Pendry Avenue, leading from Pendry’s Wharf on Lake Eustis in the 1870s, where steamboats docked to offload visitors eager to check into the Ocklawaha, had been changed to Magnolia Avenue. Scarcely a trace of Pendryville remained, the village where Augustus S. Pendry became Postmaster on 9 July 1877. The layout of Pendry’s town was largely unchanged from the Plat that Augustus had recorded in Orange County, but names of the city’s original founders had been eliminated from the Lake County town of Eustis.

All traces of Pendryville were gone. All that is, except one. The small lake on Pendry’s Ocklawaha Hotel property was still known by the name Augustus and Olivia had given it four decades prior.

Lake Gracie was still Lake Gracie, named in honor of their daughter, Gracie Olivia (Pendry). Born 1873 in Rochester, New York, prior to the family’s move to Florida, their daughter’s namesake lake, in 1914, was the sole reminder that the Pendry family of Rochester, New York once lived here in Eustis, Florida.

Perhaps seeing Lake Gracie put a smile on the face of a proud father in search of something to cement his family’s legacy here in Eustis. But would anyone remember? Would anyone recall that Lake Gracie was in fact a memorial to a son and daughter of the American Revolution?

Gracie Olivia (Pendry) Crandall (1873-1964) and her husband spent winters in Bradenton visiting her father. She continued visiting the state after both her father and husband died, and she herself passed away in Bradenton in 1964. Gracie had also returned to visit Eustis at least once after her father’s road trip of 1914. On 13 May 1934, she attended the Eustis Seminary Association annual meeting at Marsh Memorial Park. Gracie had not been one of the eight students in the school’s first graduation class of 16 May 1890, but Gracie did graduate soon thereafter.

Eustis Seminary Academy closed in 1902, and the year after the 1937 reunion attended by Gracie, the abandoned building was razed.

Eustis Seminary Academy (1890-1902)

Lake Gracie is more than a memorial to one of the earliest students of the Eustis Seminary though. Augustus Sawyer Pendry had been a lineal descendant of the American Revolutionary War Patriot Tom Sawyer (1741-1796), qualifying Augustus as a son, and his daughter Gracie as a daughter of the American Revolution. Lake Gracie, therefore, is a memorial as well to The Daughters of the American Revolution, a society dedicated to preserving our country’s history.

A Minute-Man Sergeant, Thomas Sawyer had been a member as well of Vermont’s Board of War. (Julia Pendry Bidelman (1863-1954), the sister of Augustus Sawyer Pendry, was accepted into the NSDAR. Her Patriot being Thomas Sawyer.

Golden Velvety Roads!

“The Golden Triangle,” wrote the author of this slogan, “is so named on account of its shape and the peculiarly rich, yellow soil.” Remove the topsoil, he said, and you will find soil perfect for the growing of oranges. But that rich, yellow soil, or clayish soil as is more commonly known, was a perfect soil too for making “Good Roads”. (Clay mixed with cement forms a hard sub-surface and is still used at times in building roads today).

The praise of Lake County’s “Good Roads” carried into 1916, as the Dixie Highway officially linked Michigan with the Sunshine State, and municipalities along the route of the Dixie struggled to build suitable roadways. “The Eustis Lake Region had a hard fight to secure asphalt paving for Lake County highways,” reported the Miami News on December 22, 1916, “rather than the ‘bumpy brick’ which, unless laid in concrete is so unsatisfactory, but the fight brought results all right, and now the Lake Region has the pleasure of reporting that young people skim along on roller skates from their country homes to do their Christmas shopping in Eustis. Moreover, everyone who travels over the velvety Lake County roads invokes a blessing on the progressive people who built and paid for them.”

A Run to Tavares

My latest book, Florida’s Enchanting Golden Triangle, starts off with my telling about The Run to Eustis and of how Lake County of 1914 was known for having some of the best roads in all of Florida. Named “Golden Triangle” for the tri-city area of Eustis, Mount Dora and Tavares, one could make a convincing argument today for a much larger tri-city area, such as Astor, Leesburg, and the Ghost Town of Ethel, but the land area inside the “towns” first mentioned were the primary focus of the “architect” of the Golden Triangle region. John A. MacDonald was selling land within the three locations in the 1880s, just as also authored a book, Plain Talk about Florida, published in 1883.

The history of the Golden triangle area detailed in Plain Talk about Florida, published 143 years ago, has been overlooked for far too long. Although his book was a sales pitch to lure Northerners to the South, the people, places and historical information John A. MacDonald wrote about, after careful verification, makes his book an early historical recording of the birth of this tri-city area.

John A. MacDonald arrived in Central Florida in 1867, just after the Civil War. He describes the area around present-day Sanford at that time; the people; their despair, his inability to find work in a war-torn Central Florida. As a land agent, MacDonald tells of moving west from Sanford first toward the Wekiva River, then further west to Lake Eustis – the area he fell in love with and began developing as “The Golden Triangle.”

In the words of MacDonald in 1883, “The Golden Triangle was all government land a few years ago and was selected by the State Engineer as the site for the future Capitol of Florida. It is the exact center of the State, the center of the great fruit region, the center of gardening interest, and will soon be the center of population. The first town lots were surveyed in 1881 at Eustis, Mount Dora and Tavares. The area had at that time not more than one hundred inhabitants, one small schoolhouse, one small store, a rough boarding house, no railroad nor regular steamboat.”

Both a surveyor and land agent, John A. MacDonald took it upon himself to transform a remote wilderness into an American Paradise. But Florida’s Enchanting Golden Triangle is more than merely a history of three sister-cities, my book includes his Plain Talk about Florida, the story of Central Florida of the late 1860s until 1882, as told by an eyewitness to that history. I expand on MacDonald’s history as well, providing an account of the man who dreamed of the collective existence of three cities, and then made it happen.

And so, I invite you to take a Run to Tavares in your own personal automobile on Saturday, June 27, 2026, and pay a visit to the historic Lake County Historical Museum, 317 West Main Street, Tavares, Florida. I’ll be one of 14 History Authors at Hooked on History Book Fest, 10AM to 3PM, where you can look over my new book, Florida’s Enchanting Golden Triangle, as well as all my books and a vast collection of History and Historical Fiction books.

In addition to History Authors, the Friends of Golden Triangle History will be having a museum scavenger hunt for the young at heart. After touring the museum and locating each of the items on the hunt, those completing the hunt will receive a Edgar J. Banks Junior Explorer League Certificate of Completion.

Who was Edgar J. Banks? the Friends of Golden Triangle History will tell you all about the Eustis resident who, after climbing Mount Ararat in Turkey, excavating in the Arabian Desert, became the inspiration for the movie character, Indiana Jones!

Join us June 27, 2026, 10AM to 3PM, for a fun day of history in Tavares. 14 History Writers, a scavenger hunt, and so much more!

Plan to make a Run To Tavares and I will see you there!