Global
Food Heritage Project
Food
Heritage Sites:
Lost But Not Forgotten
Plantation
Inn
Lake
Wales, Florida, USA
Food Heritage Sites: Preserved
| Remembered
| Endangered
| Newsmakers
Snowbirds come to Florida
to escape the cold but often find much
more than higher temperatures. They
become attached to a place and its people,
and the happening is mutual. The burning
of a grand old in Lake Wales illustrated
that in 1979. With it passed a piece
of old Florida.
A tall brick chimney
stood in a circle of ashes where one
tiny arena of life had been cremated.
From the burnt-out center, the heat
had radiated to damage a part of everything
that was close. Some of it showed, tree
trunks scorched up one side, shrubs
shriveled brown on just one side, and
some did not.
Perry Littles, tall
and dignified, napped and fretted in
the living room of his house over on
North Avenue. He fought the heat with
a fan and an air conditioner. He had
waited tables in that old hotel since
1938. At age 70, what would he do now?
James Kahler, young
and athletic, probed around in the ashes
trying to save some of the old bricks.
His family had owned a hotel under the
tall oaks along scenic Highway 27 all
his life and he a taken over the management
a year earlier. But insurance for the
old building had been too expensive.
At 28, he had no plans.
The old Plantation
Inn was in Lake Wales, the heart to
Florida, away from the crowded coasts,
just below the frost line. A minister
from Minnesota had been spending his
winters there for years, ever since
he retired. He tipped the waiters at
the end of each season, rather than
the end of each meal, and they kidded
him about how he would handle parishioners
who skipped the collection plate for
months at a stretch.
A widow from Wisconsin
called the Inn her winter home, the
guests and staff her family away from
the family. During the off-season, she
wrote them "wish-I-were-there"
letters.
There were others,
lots of others. Kahler worried about
them. "Everything burned,"
he said. "Even the guests' histories,
the names and addresses, everything.
We have not been able to tell everybody.
When they get in touch with us, we tried
to find them someplace else to stay,
but it's hard to get something they
want."
"Those old ladies
didn't have a lot of money," Littles
explained. "Some of the them. won't
come. They won't be able to find another
place like we had. It was a good old
place, good to all of us. People are
different now. They won't have places
like that anymore."
The Inn was like a
club for the elderly, permitting a sprinkling
of the younger. There were bingo nights,
card nights, a big fireplace in the
television room, a sharing of problems
and limited joys. Waiters wore red jackets
and short pants with long white stockings,
and governed at the high ceiling the
old dining room with genteel authority.
They chatted with guests about the weather,
exchanged advice, laugh that jokes,
looked in family pictures. The meals
came from an old-fashioned kitchen where
one family, its members passing on the
jobs from one generation to the next,
have been doing the cooking since 1919.
One night, fire flickered
alive in the closed and shuttered old
inn, whose sturdy heart pine floors
and walls had been sawed and planed
when Taft was president of the 46 states.
Flames rushed across the old boards
and turn them into ashen smoke. In just
two hours everything was gone.
The founding Lake Wales
Land Management Co. built it as the
Wales Hotel in 1911, the first real
structure among a landscape of piney
woods and canvas tents, so guests would
have a place to stay while they came
and looked at Lake country land they
could buy cheap.
The 25 rooms and 11
fireplaces were palatial then, costing
$20,000 and offering hot and cold running
water. Broad piazzas overlooked Crystal
Lake, and a private plant furnished
power for lights. The hotel became the
social center where clubs met, governors
and senators came to speak, the high
school held its proms and celebrities
stayed. General George Custer's widow,
for example, preferred it.
Lake Wales developed
a variety and range as it grew into
a city of 10,000. Citrus and recreational
opportunities bloomed in this almost
exact center of Florida. The famed singing
Tower and nature sanctuary at Iron Mountain,
created by magazine editor Edward Bok
and dedicated 1929 by Calvin Coolidge,
marked its golden anniversary with an
address by Bok’s grandson, President
Derek Bok of Harvard University. Meanwhile,
the grand dragon of United Ku Klux Klan's
of America cut heair as usual at his
local barbershop.
Amid all this, the
old Plantation Inn had remained a special
place that offered a certain charm and
refreshing familiarity, a thread maternally
wound through the intricate new patterns
of community life. It recalled the reason
and the style that gave birth to Lake
Wales. Maybe its loss was not a tragedy
in the modern dimension of tragedies,
but maybe we are being robbed of the
fullness of life when it takes so much
more to make us cry, or to laugh, then
it should.
"I don't know,"
Jimmy Kaler said. "I was planning
for what I might be able to do in 10
years. We can build another place unless
we get some partners. Otherwise, will
sell, I guess, and that'll be the end
of it."
Perry Littles was discouraged
too. "Have to get me a job somewhere,"
he said. But he and the others do not
expect to need their red jackets or
white stockings anymore. "Maybe,"
he said sadly, "maybe they'll be
something at one of those fast food
places."
Al Burt’s The
Tropic of Cracker, August 18, 1979.
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