Friday, September 17, 2021

MOUNT DORA: The First Mount Dorans - Finale

 

The First Mount Dorans: Season Finale

GOULD’S LAKESHORE: The Conclusion


Lake Dora, Mount Dora, Florida

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.

 


Sketch drawn in 1883 of Mount Dora's Fifth Avenue

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

 

Monday, September 13, 2021

MOUNT DORA: Season 2 - The First Mount Dorans - Part 4

 

Part 4: The Thompson House

The Thompson House, Mount Dora


John Philip Donnelly, the individual I refer to as the ‘Second Mount Doran’, wrote in 1922 of several early Mount Dora pioneers, mentioning each by name in an address to fellow members of Mount Dora’s Yacht Club. “Wrote” is appropriate, for Donnelly declined the invitation to speak to the members and instead offered to write a speech for someone else to read. The presentation was then reprinted in the local newspaper at various times in later years.

The topic of John Donnelly’s ‘paper’ was the history of Mount Dora, but the speech, it was reported, drew numerous laughs when read at the Yacht Club Smoker of February 1922. These many years later, therefore, the challenge for a historian is to separate fact from fiction.  

Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders.

Donnelly began his version of the town’s founding by naming a few early pioneers important to the first days of Mount Dora, individuals such as John A. MacDonald and Alexander St. Clair-Abrams, prior to adding, “and a stumpy, corpulent old gentleman from East Liverpool, Ohio.”

Likely meant to draw a chuckle or two, Donnelly did not name the stumpy old gentleman from East Liverpool, Ohio. So, was he merely poking fun at an old friend in the audience, a Yacht club member perhaps, such as Commodore Thompson? His comment could have been directed at Sandie Porter, the East Liverpool merchant who, in 1881, had purchased the very first Mount Dora town parcel. Porter bought before Mount Dora had even been officially christened Mount Dora.

Perhaps though Donnelly was poking fun at William Gardner, the realtor from East Liverpool who had purchased the long-abandoned Willcox property, the land adjacent to Annie Stone’s historic citrus grove. Gardiner was developing the land near Coliseum Way, where the heirs of Annie Donnelly were likewise attempting to develop homesites. Donnelly may have meant the brother-in-law of William Gardner though, the East Liverpool, Ohio snowbird who assisted in building that magnificent Gardner lakeside home, the stately home that to this day continues to stand guard over Lake Dora.

So many Buckeyes from East Liverpool, Ohio to consider!


The C. C. Thompson Pottery Company, East Liverpool, Ohio


Commodore Thompson, a member during the 1920s of Mount Dora Yacht Club, tops the list of likely candidates in my view. I think Donnelly was poking at a friend, George C. Thompson, an annual Mount Dora winter resident who built the Thompson House on 5th Avenue. President of an East Liverpool, Ohio company at the time, George Thompson had become the chief operating officer after the death of his father, Cassius C. Thompson, founder of C. C. Thompson Pottery Company. (The significance of pottery in the early 20th century is easily lost today, but back then, as our Nation was developing, nearly every home in America had pottery dinnerware).

Pottery was a huge industry at the dawn of the 20th century. C. C. Thompson Pottery Company of East Liverpool, Ohio was a major player in that industry.


Looking east on Simpson's Fashionable 5th Avenue from McDonald Street

Strolling west along Mount Dora’s Fashionable 5th Avenue, Thompson House, as it is most often called today, is the impressive white residence trimmed in tropical palm green, hiding behind the white concrete block wall having tropical palm green gates. The Thompson House, bult in 1929, is indeed historical, but it was in fact the second home built in Block #58 of Mount Dora.

Another residence, still standing in 1929 when George Cassius Thompson built his home, had at one time occupied that entire city block plus the entire city block to the west.

Lyman Todd of Chicago bought Block 58 at the same time he acquired Block 57. He also bought an additional slice of shoreline of Lake Dora. Lyman Todd built a hilltop home overlooking Lake Dora, complete with its own free-standing bowling alley. Built during the first days of the 1890s, the Lyman Todd home was afforded an unobstructed view of Lake Dora.

One could write an entire chapter about the history of Blocks 57 and 58. And in fact, Chapter 28 of Mount Dora. The Lure. The Founding. The Founders., hot off the presses, does just that!

 

George C. Thompson purchased one-fourth of Block 58 from Miss Easter Armstrong, a Mount Doran who contributed greatly to developing the cultural aspect of the city. Active in the Mount Dora Woman’s Club, Miss Armstrong performed the first play reading by members of the club. Easter Armstrong helped found the Art League, Reading Circle, Book Club, and Garden Club.

The home of Lyman Todd passed to his sister, Mary (Todd) Armstrong, and then to the daughter of Mary Armstrong, Miss Easter Armstrong.

 

The Museum of Ceramics at East Liverpool, Ohio, occupies today the historic 5th Street home of Cassius C. Thompson. This 5th Street home was also the birthplace of George C. Thompson, or Commodore Thompson as known to those friends who visited him at his 5th Avenue residence during each winter in downtown Mount Dora.

 Contents Page of my New Mount Dora Book



MOUNT DORA

The Lure. The Founding. The Founders.

Available NOW at AMAZON


"The new railroad intersects Mrs. Donnelly's grove, running close to the dwelling."

Click on Book Cover above to buy at Amazon, or

Buy a signed copy November 1, 2021, at the Official Book Launch.

OR: buy it now, then bring your book for signing on November 1st.


YOU ARE INVITED to my BOOK LAUNCH

The Green Room, Mount Dora Community Center

November 1, 2021, 5:30 to 7:30 PM

Baker Street in historic downtown Mount Dora

MountDora@CroninBooks.com