A Brief History of Longwood, Florida: The Railroad Man's Town

A concise, readable history of Longwood, Florida, the Seminole County town whose oldest streets outlasted every boom that should have erased them. It begins in Spring Hammock, where an ancient bald cypress called The Senator served as a wayfinding landmark for travelers long before any town existed, and follows Edward Warren Henck, the young Boston railroad man who arrived by steamboat in 1873, named his clearing for the suburb he had helped lay out back home, and then helped organize the South Florida Railroad that made it a town. Here are the building decade of the 1880s whose wood-frame district still stands; the Great Freeze that ended the grove era; the quiet 1923 incorporation at the top of a boom the town declined to join; the roadside decades of springs, highways, and busloads of visitors walking the boardwalk to the great tree; the labor history the record owes a fuller telling, stated honestly; the late-arriving suburb and the preservation choice that saved the district; and the January night in 2012 when The Senator burned, and the clone called The Phoenix that grows in its place. Written from public sources, it anchors its dates to their records and says plainly where the record runs thin. Nine short chapters, with a timeline and a guide to where the history is still standing.