Winter Garden

I went to a Winter Garden history talk at the WG Heritage Foundation …

Recent history began in the 1890s, with the city established in the 1900s, doing very well through the 1950s with tourism fishing on the lake, and loads of vegetable and orange growing – the two downtown railroads shipping goods north … And then the lake got too polluted, the orange trees were killed by repeated frosts and the new bigger roads bypassed downtown … By the end of the 1980s downtown businesses were mostly gone.

But a few people worked to save it, rescuing local buildings and getting the West Orange Trail through downtown, and much more to get us where we are now …

UPDATE: Winter Garden Heritage has posted the complete hour long video on YouTube.

Then I walked back, past the live music in the middle of Plant St, past long lines at ice-cream Scoops, past many busy restaurants, past City Hall doing Halloween with a scary maze to explore, past Plant Street Market / Crooked Can celebrating Oktoberfest … Amazing to see how vibrant downtown is now, compared to what is was only 20-25 years ago!

I went back into town this morning to take some daytime photos of the halloween maze:

Our local French Bakery Le Petit Paris has started doing workshops to learn about making their products and today I joined them to learn about making sour dough bread. The course is quite expensive ($140) but it was very fun and I learned lots – and came home with bread!

Stefan, the baker / owner, presents the workshop and had a good set of instructions and good use of time to ensure us four attendees benefited … he began by giving us prepared dough to shape into bread (which went into proving and later was cooked for us to take home); we then moved to being shown how the dough was made, and how sough dough starter is used and care for.

Here’s photos from my morning …

“Long ago” Winter Garden had a downtown car show every few months; the last event was just before covid hit in January 2020 and with downtown still with lots of outdoor seating rather than parking spaces, there’s no longer space for that type of car show.

There have been some car shows in Hamlin but they’re not really the same (mostly more modern cars in a parking lot); there’s also a regular car show at the Margaritaville Resort on US 192 but it’s far enough that we’ve only been twice.

But today we had a nearby “car stroll under the oaks” in Oakland sponsored by Shannon Till; the cars were parked along the West Orange Trail and on the grass (there’s not a lot of space in Oakland!) and we enjoyed our “stroll” …