From
every direction a visitor can view
groves and citrus processing plants,
and sniff the pungent citrus aromas
in the air.
Every
day hundreds of trucks loaded with
oranges or grapefruits pass through
the town on their way to the dozens
of packing facilities in the area.
Lake
Wales is a place of which you can
truly say its streets are paved with
"gold," the vivid yellows
and orange of citrus.
Open-topped citrus transport trucks
spill their share, leaving orange
crush on the pavement
and
lining the roadsides.
Lake
Wales' largest employer is the grower-owned
Florida's Natural. Across
highway 27 from the juice factory
is their visitor center, The
Grove House.
Inside
visitors can sample the juices, tour
a museum exhibit about citrus and
view several multi-media presentations.
At
Lake Wales' historic Depot Museum
you can explore more exhibits and
artifacts associated with the citrus
business, as well as other aspects
of the town's history.
Lake
Wales' Post Office has a striking
WPA panoramic painting of the groves
and the town's skyline, dominated
by the Bok Sanctuary's bell tower.
The world famous Bok Gardens
are surrounded by citrus groves. Bok
Sanctuary is planning a new interpretative
center featuring exhibits and a living
display of citrus plants.
Oranges
are still harvested by hand. Pickers
stand on ladders and put the fruit
in large bags slung across their chests.
Citrus
industry pioneer G.V. Tillman was
one of the founders of Lake Wales.
His 1915 house has been preserved,
and is open to the public as a Bed
and Breakfast.
A
small place the size of Lake Wales
has a surprising number of restaurants,
including two crazy ones.
Crazy
Cuban, a popular downtown lunch
hangout and...
Crazy
Fish, always the freshest fish,
always busy. Just north of the city,
surrounded by orange groves, is
Chalet Suzanne, a landmark inn
and restaurant on the National Historic
Register.
Six
course dinners are in the $75 range
and feature their famous "moon"
soups. Moon soup is ???
Lake
Wales has one French patisserie/cafe
and two fresh fish markets. Above
is a local joint open only 3 days
a week, featuring not only fresh local
fish, but also turtles and frogs.
Two
Lake Wales food heritage sites have
been lost. The Plantation Inn
was a famous establishment for half
a century until a fire put it out
of business. Here's a description
of what it was like in its prime.
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.
Al Burt The
Tropic of Cracker, August, 1979
Read
the full article here.
The
other lost food heritage monument
is a wall mosaic of Da Vinci's The
Last Supper, featured attraction
of Lake Wales' Masterpiece
Gardens.
Here's
a recollection by Joseph Siano in
the New York Times:
And then there was Masterpiece Gardens,
which closed in 1981. Visitors walked
through a garden, just north of Lake
Wales, Fla., until they came to a
large wall covered by a curtain. It
was slowly drawn (to solemn recorded
music) to reveal ''The Great Masterpiece'':
a giant mosaic copy of Leonardo da
Vinci's ''Last Supper.'' I tried not
to think of this on my first visit
to Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan,
but it was like trying to listen to
the ''William Tell'' Overture without
thinking of the Lone Ranger.
Read
the rest of reporter Siano's Florida's
bygone attractions here.
Cattle
ranching and fertilizer production
are two important food-related industries
located close to Lake Wales. To the
west is one of the great phosphate
mining centers of the world. You can
learn all about the importance of
phosphates for fertilizers at the
Phosphate Museum in the town
of Mulberry.
"Phosphate is a primary ingredient
in fertilizers, and Florida mines
supply 75% of the phosphate used by
America's farmers. The City of Mulberry
has been known for years as the Phosphate
Capital of the World.
Fifteen
to thirty feet beneath peninsular
Florida's sandy soil is a ten to twenty
foot thick layer of phosphate rock.
This part of the state was once under
the sea. Over millions of years, billions
of phosphate particles derived primarily
from dead sea life settled into layers
with sand and clay. These layers were
eventually covered under sandy soil
as the sea retreated.
Bone
Valley is one of the world's most
extensive mineable phosphate reserves,
covering 1.2 million acres (1,977
square miles) in Polk, Hillsborough,
Hardee, Manatee, and DeSoto Counties.
Bone Valley takes its name from the
fossilized remains of more than one
hundred species that lived here millions
of years ago. Sharks' teeth, fossilized
plant and animal life, and petrified
shells and corals are routinely uncovered
during mining operations, and many
are preserved and displayed in the
Museum galleries, along with memorabilia
and educational exhibits.
Phosphate
mining in Florida dates back to 1881
and deposits found in Alachua County,
some 150 miles north of Mulberry.
Mining technologies have progressed
markedly since that time, when picks
and shovels and eventually mule-drawn
scrapers were used to break apart
the rock."
The
Mulberry Phosphate Museum is open
Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00am
to 4:30pm. A large dragline bucket
is adjacent to the parking lot behind
a load of mined rock. Museum visitors
are free to sift through the rock
for fossils and sharks' teeth.
Description
and image from Geocaching.com
Read
more about the Phosphate Museum and
industry here.
East
of Lake Wales, in Kissimmee River
State Park, part of the remarkable,
award-winning state park system, is
a unique living history outdoor museum
called the Cow Camp.
Visitors
step back in time to 1870's and listen
to a Florida cow hunter (not cowboy)
talk about his work.
The
cows, descendants of the Andalusian
breed the Spanish brought to Florida,
once roamed free most of the year.
Hunted
and rounded up by dogs, penned, branded
and driven north to the railhead near
Jacksonville during the Civil War,
or later, southwest to Punta Rassa
where they were shipped live to Cuba,
these cattle proved to be hardy and
resilient.
Cow
camps like these were located every
15 miles across the state from near
St. Augustine to Arcadia and Punta
Rassa. The
Kissimmee State Park Cow Camp
features a campfire with coffee pot
boiling and a covered area for cots,
tables and a chuckwagon.
Read
more about the Cow Camp.
Links
City
of Lake Wales
Lake
Wales Chamber of Commerce
Florida's
Natural
Chalet
Suzanne
Lake
Wales Historic District
Lake
Wales area restaurants
Cow
Camp
Albuquerque Biopark
Culinary Archives
and Museum
Living History Farms
Sainsbury's Virtual
Museum 
