Pine Castle Pioneers / Pine Castle Lakes - Part 2

 

Pine Castle Pioneers / Pine Castle Lakes

Celebrating Pine Castle Pioneer Days ONLINE – Part 2

 

Orange County’s FIRST paid job: Clear a straight path SIX MILES long!  

ORLANDO, settled in 1856, is not in PINE CASTLE Township. Orlando Township, six miles by six miles like that of Pine Castle Township, was not surveyed until April 1846, three years after Pine Castle Township had been surveyed by Benjamin F. Whitner.

Arriving in Mosquito County at Lake Monroe in 1843, Surveyor Whitner followed a sand-rutted military trail south, skirting after nearly 15 miles the abandoned fortress Maitland, then proceeding south past a swamp area known today as Lake Eola. Whitner and two laborers, Hale and Randles, continued down the wilderness trail, strolling a narrow winding path through towering pine trees and scrub brush - now Magnolia Avenue in the heart of downtown Orlando - then continuing another mile before finally stopping to set up their equipment to begin work.

They may well have been the only living souls in all of Pine Castle Township that first day, the day Benjamin Whitner began surveying the northernmost line of what was to be 540 square miles of mapping – the very first of which was 36 square miles that later surveyors would call Pine Castle Township, a landmass beginning just north of present-day Kaley Avenue, shown as the top red line on the 1879 map of Orange County below.

 

Pine Castle Township (red square) on the 1879 Orange County map above shows 4 named lakes in the 36 square miles: Clear; Holden; Jessamine and Conway. (Note unnamed Lake Lancaster in upper right corner of red square.

Below: Benjamin Whitner’s 1843 survey of the southern portion of Clear Lake. 

Surveyor Whitner worked his way south from the starting line until reaching present-day Kissimmee. In the 1840s, Benjamin F. Whitner of Florida’s Panhandle, with the help of two “chainmen”, surveyed 540 square miles south of downtown Orlando. Whitner then, after finalizing the surveys, began buying land inside the Pine Castle Township, acreage where he had first begun his surveying work in 1843.

We do not know why Whitner bypassed 23 miles of wilderness prior to starting his survey work. What we do know is that Benjamin Whitner was unlike most every other surveyor who worked in central Florida during the 1840s. Most were roving surveyors, meaning they moved from one territory to the next as the U. S. Land Office needed surveying completed in its new territories. Most of those who surveyed central Florida moved on to Nevada and California by the 1850s. But Benjamin F. Whitner of Madison, Florida was different.

First to survey land in Orange County, Whitner was also among the first to buy Orange County land (beginning in 1851). He was among the first to cultivate Orange County land (farming sugar cane at Lake Gatlin in the 1850s). He was among the first to serve as an Orange County Commissioner (1867); and was a partner (with William M. Randolph) in constructing the first ever free-standing hotel in Orange County (1869). There is good reason to believe Whitner was first to conceive of a railroad to run from Lake Monroe to Tampa Bay.

For 38 years (1843 - 1881), Benjamin F. Whitner worked as an active participant in settling and promoting two of the earliest settlements south of Lake Monroe, Fort Reid and Fort Gatlin.

Of the many lakes surveyed in 1843 by Whitner in Pine Castle Township, he named only two, Clear Lake and Lake Conway. All other lakes in the township were named after 1843, with most being named in the 1870s and 1880s by early pioneers who homesteaded on or near each lake. Whitner is believed however to have named, in the 1860s, Lake Gatlin, where he then owned nearly 300 acres.

Of the two lakes named by Whitner, Lake Conway memorialized his 1843 boss, Florida’s Surveyor General, Valentine Y. Conway (1803-1881) of Stafford County, Virginia. And perhaps impressed by the clarity he found at one other, Clear Lake is identified by that name on Whitner’s 1843 survey (see above). Other lakes surveyed by Whitner were simply noted as a “Pond”.

 

In the late 1870s, Dr. Robert Hamilton McFarland named Lake Lancaster, as I explain on page 171 of my book, Orlando Lakes: Homesteaders & Namesakes.

Doctor McFarland had married Sarah Lancaster at Fulton, IL on March 11, 1847, and a daughter, Rosa Lancaster McFarland, had been born prior to the doctor relocating his family to Orlando. The southernmost tip of Lake Lancaster, likely the first “Pond” Whitner surveyed, remained unnamed nearly 40 years until Dr. McFarland lent his wife’s maiden name to the lake – a name it is still known by these many years later.

“The water in Lake Lancaster in those days,” wrote one 1880s pioneer, “came up to the road and as we stopped to water the horse on our way to the village, many alligators would slide into the water only to come back again to the warm sand as soon as we had gone. Mother was young, slender, and about five-feet tall, but did her share of snake killing and one day killed a six-foot rattler”.

Located near “Point Zero” of Pine Castle Township, as I explain in Part 1 of this series, Whitner and two chainmen would have worked their way west along the north line of “Township 23 South; 29 East”, or as surveyors of 1890 called it, Pine Castle Township”. (As stated in Part 1, the name “Pine Castle Township” was applied to this area not by Whitner, but rather by surveyors in 1890).

1890 Pine Castle Township (page 1 - Lake Lancaster at top center) See note in upper right corner

To fully appreciate the difficult challenges three courageous souls confronted in 1843, I borrow this excerpt from ‘Taming the Illinois Wilderness’ by Author Pat Camalliere:

“Imagine hills, valley, rivers swamps, woods, etc. A typical location such as a heavily wooded area required surveyors to run a straight line through the woods from one fixed endpoint to the next. An axe man would clear a path through the trees and the underbrush while a flagman provided a sighting target for the surveyor. Once the straight line was cleared, two chainmen would measure and set a mark identifying the distance. The surveyor would then bring up the rear, sighting using a compass to make sure the crew stayed on course. A good surveying party could survey about 12 miles in one day.”

 

Surveyor Whitner’s first “endpoint” was “Point Zero” near Lake Lancaster, as defined in Part 1 of this series, at the intersection of Curry Ford Road and Ferncreek Avenue. The other “Endpoint” was six miles due west, at the opposite end of Pine Castle Township. And along the way, while clearing the brush and trekking through swamps, there were those alligators and snakes later pioneers spoke of.

Six miles due west of Lake Lancaster today is Kirkman Road’s centerline, at Valencia Community Campus in Metro West. The campus encircles charming Lake Pamela, (page 230 of Orlando Lakes: Homesteads & Namesakes) a modern-day name for a body of water once known as Lake Moody. Pioneer Jacob Moody owned land here in 1912, although before that, William Thompson of Washington, DC had owned this land. Thompson, Chief Engraver for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, had died in 1901. Of this man it was said: “The numerous copper plates in the archives engraved by him show the excellence of his work and form an enduring monument to his patience and industry.”

In my next installment, Benjamin Whitner’s surveying crew leaves Lake Pamela and heads in the direction of Devil’s Bay of 1890. Care to guess where that water feature might have been?

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Orlando Lakes: Homesteaders & Namesakes (2019)

THE AWARD WINNING - Beyond Gatlin: A History of South Orange County (2017)

First Road to Orlando (Second Edition 2015)

The Rutland Mule Matter – A Novel (2015)

CitrusLAND: Curse of Florida’s Paradise (Second Edition 2016)

TAVARES: Darling of Orange County, Birthplace of Lake County (NEW in 2020)

 

Author for Pine Castle Historical Society Publication:

Will Wallace Harney – Orlando’s First Renaissance Man