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 5^th 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 5^th Avenue and Hawley Street, an intersection better known today as 5^th 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 5^th 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 1^st.

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