‘The City Beautiful’s founding fathers were not pretty,” handbills for the new exhibit at the Orange County Regional History Center proclaim above real photos of old-time buckaroos who might have made Roy Rogers run.
And no wonder. “Pretty” wouldn’t get you very far in Orlando’s earliest days — when the “wolf at the door” was more than a metaphor.
The folks who settled Orlando faced wolves, wildcats and warring Seminoles in a rough-and-rowdy South that wasn’t so very different from the Wild West.
It is that world the history center aims to bring to life in “Walk Through Time With Orlando’s Pioneers, Rogues and Rascals,” which runs through April 28 in downtown Orlando.
“Walk Through Time” traces the story of the Orlando area from the founding of Fort Gatlin in the 1830s through the rest of the 19th century. The exhibit has three major sections: the Seminole War Period, Wild West Florida Style and the Victorian Era.
Special programs on Saturdays — March 8 and April 12 — focus on those topics as well.
“We’re getting into a lot of these stories in-depth — bringing out the stories we haven’t been able to tell because we just don’t have the room in our permanent exhibits,” says Michael Perkins, the history center’s director of exhibits.
THE EYES OF THE PAST
The eyes of Orlando high school students in 1902 peer out from one picture, the classmates’ faces looking like those of teenagers now, despite the starchy dresses, hair ribbons and mandatory ties for boys.
“We’ve got a Victorian parlor here,” Perkins says, pointing to carved wooden chairs upholstered in a rouge-colored silk.
“You’ll recognize it when you see it,” adds center staff member Paula Herr — the furniture was on display in the history center’s previous incarnation in Loch Haven Park.
“According to the family tradition, it was Jacob Summerlin’s parlor set,” says Wanda Edwards, the history center’s curator of collections.
THANKS TO SUMMERLIN
The chairs sit pretty high in the Orlando pantheon.
It’s a good bet that without Summerlin, the pioneer cattle king of Florida, there might never have been an Orlando as we know it today.
Born in 1820, Summerlin cast a long shadow on the piney woods prairie when, in 1873, he brought his family to reside in the small town of Orlando.
Summerlin bought 200 acres around Lake Eola, including the lake, for a reported price of 25 cents an acre.
“He loved that lake,” Perkins says. Summerlin liked it so much that he built a grand home near Lake Eola that eventually became a hotel — Orlando’s Waldorf-Astoria of its day.
Despite depictions of Summerlin as a rough-hewn rustic trailing dust from his boots, the standard history of Orlando says he was really “a quiet, courteous, kindly person, but one who could be tough when the occasion demanded.”
Right. Old Jake sure got tough in 1875. He fought not with fists or guns but with big ol’ dollars when Gen. Henry Sanford, the former U.S. minister to Belgium, came to town to woo folks to move the county seat to his growing metropolis on the St. Johns River.
Summerlin’s offer to build a $10,000 courthouse in Orlando took the wind out of Sanford’s sails. The county seat stayed put.
The importance of that can’t be underestimated, Perkins says.
“We weren’t on the water; we weren’t on any roads,” he says. But when the courthouse arrived and settled into Orlando, “that made the town. . . . That kept Orlando on the map through some pretty lean years in the 1800s.”
