Cowboys & Lawyers - Part 10 - Thomas E. Wilson

Honorable Thomas Emmett Wilson

Orange Boulevard of Seminole County, a busy rural thoroughfare today serving bedroom communities west of downtown Sanford, Florida, was once a roadbed for the train that opened-up the wild west – Central Florida’s wild west that is. Few obvious signs remain today of 19^th century cities founded along the route of Orange Belt Railroad, but glaring evidence does indeed exist.

After crossing State Road 46 heading south, Orange Boulevard intersects with Wilson Road, an east-west artery memorializing a leading Orange County Attorney of the 1870s and 1880s, the Honorable Thomas Emmett Wilson. Head east off Orange Boulevard a short distance on Wilson Road and you will soon come to yet another memorial for the man, Emmett Street.

Turn south at Wilson and Emmett and note the two arteries of yesteryear, 5^th Street and 1^st Street, both lonely remnants of the 1880s town of Sylvan Lake – a railway stop on the Orange Belt Railway – a town founded by Attorney Thomas Emmett Wilson.

Residence of Attorney Thomas E. Wilson

Railroad tracks laid down by Orange Belt Railway are long gone, and the land in these parts has, since 1913, been part of Seminole County. Much of the rich history of these rural communities though had been forgotten – despite survival of hints in the form of monikers that long ago identified railroad towns such as Sylvan Lake, Paola, Island Lake, Glen Ethel and even Palm Springs. 

I myself first learned of the historic significance of such ‘place names’ a dozen years ago, and I profiled each, as well as towns Altamont (no ‘e’), Forest City, Lakeville, Clarcona, Crown Point, Winter Garden and Oakland, in my second book – still popular today – CitrusLAND: Ghost Towns & Phantom Trains (Second Edition released in 2015).

CitrusLAND: Ghost Towns & Phantom Trains

True-life central Florida pioneers, and Florida’s Freeze of 1894-95

Click on cover to read my 5 Star review and/or to buy it now at Amazon

Any biography of Thomas Emmett Wilson however would need to point out that the founding of his town of Sylvan Lake was easily the least of this bachelor’s many accomplishments. The end of the line for Orange Belt Railroad, for example, was St. Petersburg – on the Gulf Coast - a town founded by the railway’s founder, Russian immigrant Peter A. Demens. Thomas E. Wilson's client was the Orange Belt Railway, and at the founder’s direction, Wilson filed the town charter establishing the city of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Born 1847 at Putnam County, New York, Wilson came to Florida in the early 1870s as a Veteran of the Civil War. He had served four years with New York’s 8^th Calvary before being admitted in 1868 to the New York Bar. As an ex-Calvary officer, he was quite comfortable traveling rough dirt roads of central Florida selling his legal services via horseback. Wilson served as State Attorney from 1873 through 1877, and then, in 1880, was the local Attorney in the organization of South Florida Railroad. He was also the lawyer for Florida Midland Railway, and in the mid-1880s for the Orange Belt Railway.  

In addition to owning more than four thousand acres scattered throughout Orange County, he had also traveled the world. Wilson’s around-the-world expedition took him to Australia, New Zealand and, said a biography appearing in the Sanford’s Gate City Chronicles of 1910, “to the borders of the Antarctic Ocean, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.”   

   

Thomas E. Wilson was 54 years old when he married his neighbor and stenographer, Elizabeth A. Fox. They had no children. Attorney Wilson died at Sanford in 1924, at the age of 77.

And so it was no surprise that, while researching for my next book on central Florida's fascinating history, that I once again stumbled upon Attorney Thomas Emmett Wilson. That, however, is a story for later this year.

Cowboys & Lawyers will continue while I continue to research and write my next book - due out later this summer. In the meantime, stay safe and wealth - and read a good book or two.

Visit CroninBooks.com to view your central Florida history store.