Women's History Month - Day 9

 

Frontierswomen of Central Florida

Dora Ann #Fletcher Drawdy (1828-1885)

A Women’s History Month Tribute

By Richard Lee Cronin, CroninBooks.com

9 March 2022

 

Day 9

CitrusLAND is celebrating Women’s History Month by honoring extraordinary central Florida frontierswomen. And as we celebrate Women’s History Month throughout March, we are also promoting each day a History Museum, listing its days and hours of operations.

See our featured History Museum in this Post

 

Dora Ann #Fletcher Drawdy has long-been celebrated as a central Florida frontierswoman for the wrong reason. Mistakenly identified as namesake of Lake Dora, historians have been trying, unsuccessfully, to uncover evidence to prove her legend true. Searches however have always come up short, and for good reason, because Dora Ann did not arrive in Florida until an entire decade after Lake Dora was named. History has, unfortunately, neglected to celebrate her true legacy, that being an extraordinary Lake Seneca area frontierswoman.

The real legacy of Dora Ann Drawdy was her strength and fortitude. She survived as a Widow of the Civil-War, alone in a wilderness as a head of a household having nine children to raise and doing so where inhabitants had little choice but to fend for themselves. Her orange grove is most often mistaken as the creation of her son George, while in fact the acreage was Dora’s original homestead, land which became George Drawdy’s grove after his mother’s death in 1885.

 

Boat House on Lake Dora, Mount Dora, Florida

Born Dora Ann Fletcher in 1828 Irwin County, Georgia, Dora married James Drawdy in 1843. The 1850 Irwin County, Georgia census lists Dora with husband and four children, each born at Georgia. The same four children, and same parents, age exactly 10 years by 1860, when the family is found living at Hawkinsville in Orange County, Florida. In 1860 the family of ten lists seven (7) children, six as natives of Georgia. The youngest, born in 1859, was born in Florida, but Lake Dora is easily proven to have been named prior to 1849.

The Civil War began within a year of the Drawdy family arriving in Florida. Dora’s husband enlisted to fight for the Confederacy, and never came home. He died at Richmond, Virginia on 19 December 1862, leaving Dora Ann Drawdy a widow with raise 9 children ages 3 thru 18.

Dora, in 1877, acquired 160 acres of wilderness located several miles east of present-day Eustis, land they cleared and planted. Dora’s orange grove was north of Lake Seneca, located at the northeast corner of 44A (Burlington Avenue) and 439, where she died in 1885.

Three Drawdy boys became grove owners in the 1880s, each homesteading in the Lake Seneca and Umatilla area. Five years after Dora Drawdy’s death, a grandson, Lewis Drawdy, was born at Lake Seneca, and as an adult in the early 1920s, Lewis relocated to Mount Dora.

[Further reading: Part 2 of Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders, by Richard Lee Cronin. See also our next featured frontierswoman, Theodora (Flotard) Tracy.]

 

Theodora #Flotard married Surveyor Charles C. Tracy on 19 November 1846 at St. Augustine, Florida. Charles Tracy had been one of several government surveyors mapping Florida during the 1830s and 1840s, charting a map grid which began in the north at the Georgia state line and worked south. Surveys were needed so that deeds could be issued to homesteaders, as the legal description of homesteads (Sections, Townships, Ranges) were provided by the surveys.

Mapping Florida was completed in a grid six miles by six miles, or 36 square miles of land, lakes, swamps, and flatlands. Rarely did surveyors name lakes they sketched on surveys, but occasionally an exception was made. One exception was Charles C. Tracy, who was surveying in the vicinity of Lakes Eustis, Harris, and Dora in late 1846 when he took time off to return to St. Augustine for his wedding. Charles C. Tracy, afterwards, returned to sign off on the survey of Lake Dora prior to leaving Florida. By 1850, C. C. Tracy was surveying in California.

 

Actress Dora Tracy debut, Sacramento, California, April 23, 1863

Theodora (Flotard) Tracy gave birth to a daughter while living with her mother at St. Augustine in 1850. By 1860, “Dora” Tracy and her two children were living in San Francisco, where “Mrs. Dora Tracy” would soon become one of the earliest actresses to perform on stage in California. Dora died in California in 1868, but her daughter, Helen Tracy, born at St Augustine, followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a New York actress.  

[Further reading: a more detailed account of Dora Drawdy, Theodora Flotard Tracy, Helen Tracy and Virginia Tracy can be found in Part 2 of Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders., by Richard Lee Cronin]

 

Clementine Virginia #Forrest Caldwell of Orlando might never have known had it not been for mention of her being a hotel proprietor in the 1915 history by Clarence E. Howard called, Early Settlers of Orange County. But even then, it required more research to connect “Mrs. Caldwell” with Orlando’s special frontierswoman, Clementine Virginia (Forrest) Caldwell of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

“Mrs. Caldwell came to Orlando, Florida,” said Orlando author C. E. Howard, “from Danville, Pennsylvania in 1887, and securing the Summerlin Hotel on Lake Eola, converted it into a select tourist house and all the years since she has made of it a resort to which patrons delight to come.”

Clarence Howard continued: “in the old days this hotel was the headquarters of many politically inclined and if walls had as many tongues as they are said to have ears, the dining room of this old place would tell many a story. The newer places of resort spring up all about us, but Mrs. Caldwell’s ‘Summerlin House,’ so long as it stands, will linger fondly in the minds of the older settlers of Orange County.”

Summerlin Hotel appears in the left behind the 1875 Orange County Court House

Photo adapted from a Florida Memory Project photo

From the above account we can ascertain that Clementine Virginia (Forrest) Caldwell assumed management of the Summerlin House soon after Henrietta Barbaroux (See March 2, 2022, Post) left the hotel as manager to establish her Southern School for Girl’s.

Orlando’s 1915 City Directory listed Mrs. Clementine V. Caldwell as proprietor of Summerlin Hotel. much as Howard’s 1915 history did. She apparently operated the hotel for more than a quarter century.

Born 20 November 1841 to George Washington & Sarah (Hartman) Forrest at Lewisburg, Pa, Clementine Forrest married James D. Caldwell.

Our History Museum of the Day

Orange County Regional History Center

This downtown Orlando history museum occupies the restored 1927 Courthouse and is accessed via Heritage Park (the original 4 acres village of Orlando). The museum is also directly across Magnolia Avenue from the site of the Summerlin House Hotel of the above featured Clementine Virginia #Forrest Caldwell.

65 East Central Blvd., Orlando, FL 32801

407-836-8500

 

Questions? Comments? Email Rick@CroninBooks.com