The First Mount Dorans: Season Finale
GOULD’S LAKESHORE: The Conclusion
What if the naming of Lake Dora had been a love story?
Seriously! A legend of Dora Ann Drawdy tells us the lake was named by Dora: “My
grandmother gave them meals and did their laundry,” and because of Dora’s
kindness, says her family’s legend, “the government surveyors named Lake Dora
in her honor.”
But what if historians have merely been repeating
something said in error long, long ago? Is it not a historian’s role to do the
research so as to determine if a legend is real or not?
The legend of Lake Dora’s namesake:
If you have followed my series since Part One on 22 March,
you know the subject has been a leisure stroll along Mount Dora’s Fashionable 5th
Avenue. Our westbound walk began at what might at first seem an unlikely starting
point. But to fully appreciate the town’s true origin, and to attempt to prove
or disprove a legend, the 1,538-foot walk toward Lake Dora’s shore needed to begin
at the crossroads of 5th Avenue and Hawley Street, an
intersection better known today as 5th Avenue and Tremain Street.
Each
of nine previous blogs in this series took us closer to the lakeshore. And although
we are walking along a modern-day street of downtown Mount Dora, we are in fact
tracing the historic footsteps first taken in 1848 by a government surveyor
named James M. Gould.
The
sketch above is part of an 1883 exhibit to a deed issued by the founders of
Mount Dora. In the upper right corner are the words “Section Corner”. The line left
of that section corner, a line running west to the lake’s edge and beneath the
words “Section Line”, is today the centerline of Fifth Avenue.
“I
began at the northeast corner of Section 31.” That was the exact description
penned 173 years ago by Surveyor James M. Gould. While I have no intention
of making a land surveyor of you, it is important that you understand Gould’s 1848 note.
The very spot Surveyor James Gould stated in 1848 is today the intersection of
5th Avenue & Tremain Street.
Surveyor
James Gould stated in 1848 that after starting at the northeast corner of
Section 31, he then began walking “23.30 chains,” the equivalent of 1,537.8 feet,
“due west to Lake Dora”. We have been making this identical walk in this series
and have now arrived at the shoreline of Lake Dora. I can state the lake’s name
because it is an existing name. James Gould wrote the name as well, seemingly
as if the name was existing then too.
Historian Walter Sime (1921-2003) made just such a
comment long before me! In January 1995, after Walter Sime read the actual
notes made in 1848 by James Gould, stated that When Gould arrived at the shore
of another lake, Gould noted: “Let’s call it Lake Ellen Hawkins.” Gould did not
make any such reference to naming Lake Dora, and concluded, “it may be that
Lake Dora had already been named by C. C. Tracy when he surveyed the Township
boundaries in 1846.”
James Gould was unaware that Lake Ellen Hawkins had already
been named because the lake’s name did not appear on the survey boundaries he
had been given. His finished survey maps, the same used later by pioneers
seeking homesteads, shows the name Lake Ellen Hawkins crossed out and Lake
Eustis penciled above it. Lake Eustis and Griffin were the only two lakes named
on the 1830s War Map drawn up by the Army.
Historian Walter Sime expressed uncertainty about the
legend of Dora Ann Drawdy. He stated too that the earliest historian to write about
the legend was William T. Kennedy (1858-1930). Kennedy wrote his history in 1929,
but the earliest recorded discussion of the legend of Dora Ann Drawdy that I
found was in 1922 – a history of Mount Dora as written by John P. Donnelly.
The “father of Mount Dora,” Donnelly’s history was
read to members of Mount Dora Yacht Club at a “Smoker” in February 1922. The written
history was then republished in 1926 and several other times by the Mount
Dora Topic newspaper. A nearly identical version appears in “Memories of
Mount Dora and Lake County” by David Edgerton, son of Charles Edgerton, a member
of the Yacht Club in the 1920s.
David Edgerton’s version however starts out as “my
grandparents, Jim and Dora Ann Drawdy.” The only known grandchild to live in
Mount Dora was Lewis J. Drawdy. He moved to Mount Dora from Seneca in 1920 and
appears the most likely descendant for the source of Edgerton’s version of the
legend.
Mount Dora was in existence at the time of Dora Ann
Drawdy’s death at Umatilla. By the time of Dora’s death, three prominent Lake
Dora area pioneers: William P. Henry, Dudley W. Adams, and Annie (McDonald) Stone-Donnelly,
all of whom were homesteaders in the 1870s, had died.
Lewis J. Drawdy, born at Seneca, Florida in 1890, was
buried in 1942 at Mount Dora’s Pine Forest Cemetery. His obituary read: “Mr.
Lewis Jackson Drawdy, 52, member of a pioneer family of this section, was taken
by death suddenly. Mr. Drawdy was born in Seneca in 1890, son of Mr. & Mrs.
James Albert Drawdy. He was the grandson of Mrs. Dora Ann Drawdy, at whose home
the United States engineers stayed while surveying this section of the state,
and for whom Lake Dora was named by these engineers. About 21 years ago Lewis
moved to Mount Dora. First employed as a local carpenter, he they went into
business for himself as a contractor and builder.”
Dora Ann Drawdy died five years before the birth of
her grandson Lewis J. Drawdy. As a young boy however, Lewis did get to know his
mother’s mother, grandmother Anna (Milton) Turner. Although his grandfather had
died in 1867, Lewis likely met his grandfather’s sister, Mrs. Ellen (Turner)
Hawkins. His Aunt Ellen Hawkins lived in the Umatilla area until her death in
1925.
Although not the namesake of Lake Ellen Hawkins, the coincidence
alone requires a historian to dig deeper before repeating a legend already
known to have a timing problem. Dora Ann Drawdy was giving birth to her third child
in Georgia, burying her first husband, and marrying a second, while James Gould
was surveying central Florida’s Great Lake Region.
What if Lake Dora had already been named when James
Gould reached the lakeshore at the west end of Mount Dora’s Fifth Avenue? What
if the naming of Lake Dora instead involved a love story?
Finding Dora is Part 2in my latest central Florida
history, Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders. Available now
at Amazon.com
MOUNT DORA
The
Lure. The Founding. The Founders.
BUY IT NOW AT AMAZON
Click
on Book Cover above to buy at Amazon, or
Buy
a signed copy November 1, 2021, at my Official Book Launch.
OR:
buy it now and bring your book for signing on November 1st.
The
Green Room, Mount Dora Community Center
A Historic location for the launch of historic book!
November
1, 2021, 5:30 to 7:30 PM
Baker
Street in historic downtown Mount Dora
