I’m featuring a Florida town that’s not on the usual tourist and visitors beaten path. Longwood:
Peter Demens (born Pyotr Dementyev in Russian) son of a nobleman he pissed off the Czar (1881) and fled to the USA. He started in New York, but soon found that Florida was booming and moved south. Here he came to Sanford and then bought a lumber mill in the small hamlet of Longwood. He sent for his family, changed his name and was elected mayor of the town that was at the time a “wild place where farm hands and cattle herders roared into town for drinking sprees…” (Best Back Roads of Florida/Waitley). He (with some tough types of his own) went a long way to clean up the town.
He took over the Orange Belt railroad (unpaid bills) and eventually ran that line to the Gulf and founded St. Petersburg (that’s a whole other story) and few other towns.
Longwood: Has a total area of 5.6 square miles. As of the census of 2010, there were 13,657 people and 5,244 households in the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwood,_Florida
OF INTEREST
1. Longwood has 35 historical buildings downtown For a walking tour map: http://www.longwoodfl.org/filestorage/210/212/412/Longwood_Walking_Tour.pdf
2. BRADLEE-MCINTYRE HOUSE: (150 W. Warren St.) Built in 1885 in Altamonte Springs, it was moved here in the early 1970’s. Th architecture and appointments have been restored to its Queen Anne style. (Hidden Florida: The Adventure Guide). Hours: open 2nd and 4th Wednesday, 11am – 4pm and on the 2nd and 4th and Sunday, 1-4pm.
3. BIG TREE PARK: (General Hutchison Parkway, north of town) while the 126′ bald cypress once the largest in the country and over 3,000 years old was destroyed by a drug addict to get some light to do her drugs in 2010, the “Senator’s sister tree, “Lady Liberty”, an approximately 2,000 year old Bald Cypress Tree. ..donated to Seminole County by Senator M.O. Overstreet and dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge in 1929 still stands in this small park.
4. Expedition Florida Adventures Day Tours: 104 Lake Oaks Blvd guided kayak tours available on the St. Johns River and the Wekiva River. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Expedition-Florida-Adventures/177984472238132
5. The Kerryman Pub: 988 W. State Road 434, Great Pub – Hole in the Wall” https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Kerryman-Pub/177253371849
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