Sister Cities Part 3 - Town of Higley, Florida

HAUNTS of a Town of HIGLEY

Sister-City: Cedar Rapids, Iowa

 

 Higley, Florida Advertisement - March 18, 1885

The HIGLEY HOUSE Hotel fronted on “the Boulevard, principal street of Town of Higley”, at a Citrus-Belt settlement founded in 1883 by Edward Emery Higley and his mother Hannah. Each formerly of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Higley’s 21 room, three story hotel was said to be “situated in the midst of 8,000 acres of the finest high, rolling pine land’. When opened March 1, 1885, the hotel’s guests arrived via stagecoach - from either Lisbon or Fort Mason, and the hotel offered a barn that could accommodate up to a dozen horses and three buggies.

Opening a hotel was no doubt a proud moment for Edward, for two decades earlier, as a young tyke, he stood helplessly and watched as his father’s Cedar Rapids hotel burned to the ground. He and mother buried Edward’s father at Cedar Rapids, Iowa soon thereafter, and in 1880, began making plans for a move to Florida.

George & Julia Webb lived at Higley House Hotel in 1885 while building their own residence, and while George assisted in establishing Webb & Higley Real Estate, a land agency offering choice lots in the far northwest reaches of Orange County. Located north of Lake Yale’s shore, Higley’s development became part of a new Lake County in May of 1887.

A precise whereabouts of Town of Higley had long remained a mystery – yet hints do exist that can once and for all resolve the mystery. For starters, an 1884 Georgia newspaper described the town as “situated within less than a mile of the northern end of Lake Yale”. That article also told of Webb & Higley’s plan to place a steamboat on Lake Yale to connect with a railroad landing at Fort Mason. (That railroad was the St. Johns & Lake Eustis (Chapter 25 in my Tavares book). 

Town of Higley (1 being City Center, see descriptions below)

 

Town of Higley was divided into "Blocks" and "lots", with lot sizes becoming larger as they moved away from city center – location of the Higley House Hotel. The settlement included acreage that is now used as a Lake Yale boat launch (A on Map) on Thomas Boat Landing Road (E on Map). Today, Holiday Lake Subdivision is adjacent to and west of the ramp, and when platted, was described as bordering the ‘East line of Block 60 of Higley.

Little more than a grassy path now, Sunset Drive (#1 on Map) began as part of a 1990 Mayfield Subdivision, the plat of which also shows an existing 50’ wide easement referred to as “Railroad Avenue”. But there is no train anywhere near this parcel now. A notation in the legal description of Mayfield (see below and right of curved road) states the land was “part of Block 22 of the unrecorded plat of Higley”. Land once owned by Hannah Higley abutted land owned by her son Edward at this exact location in 1883 - where today one travels on ‘Em En El Grove Road’ (C on Map).

 

“Railroad Avenue” easement at right above, beside “Higley unrecorded”

One 1885 deed mentions the intersection of “Webb Street and Boulevard in Block 30”, while a document recorded in 1937 places Block 30 in the same location as “Railroad Avenue”, and in the vicinity of Block 22 - or the area identified on the Map as #1 – the once upon a time heart of downtown Higley. [B and D on map are South and North ‘Em En El Grove Road’].

Florida Agriculturalist of April 22, 1885 published a notice regarding organization of the “Silver Springs, Higley and Southern Railway”, listing two officers as “E. E. Higley of Chicago, Ill., and George W. Webb of Higley, Florida”. The proposed route of the new railroad was said to be Silver Springs south to Lisbon, due south of Higley, Florida. That train, and another earlier planned railroad in the direction of Fort Mason, were never completed.

 

Higley Post Office of Orange County opened August 20, 1883. Nearly every land deed refers to a “plat of Higley, filed on or about April 2, 1884”, at the county seat in Orlando, 50 miles and a full day’s journey to the south. By 1887 the town was said to be home to 300 residents. 

After Lake County was established in 1887, copies of town plats were handed over to the new county – but neither Orange nor Lake appear to possess the Higley plat.

Florida’s Yellow Fever scare of 1887 was the first nail in the coffin of many a central Florida Ghost town. A second and final nail for many early Citrus-Belt towns were back to back freezes of December 1894 and February 1895. Countless central Floridians lost everything due to these freezes. Two months after Florida’s second freeze, Edward E. Higley died, April 10, 1895, at Eustis. 

Higley's remains were returned to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was buried alongside his father, Henry Higley (1818-1868). Hannah (Emery) Higley died in 1918, seven years after the U. S. Land Office had made its first list of vacated lot and block numbers in a nearly abandoned Lake County Town of Higley.

Today, Town of Higley remains rural, accessible only by buggy – horseless or otherwise. But when founded, Higley had been promoted as an excellent citrus growing region, a fact established by a neighbor settlement (#2 on our Map), founded two decades before Edward E. Higley ever set sights on this northwest corner of Orange County. I will take you to that historic site next!

Emeralda – where history is hiding in plain sight - when this series continues next Friday.

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Perfect companions: First Road to Orlando; Beyond Gatlin; Orlando Lakes; The Rutland Mule Matter; CitrusLAND: Ghost Towns & Phantom Trains. Visit my CroninBooks.com website for details on each. 

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Next week: Lake County’s Emeralda Island and its Sister City.