A Place in Florida – The Coats of Many Colors
There’s a place in Florida where, when somebody said they wanted to paint the town red, somebody else said okay, but we’ll also need yellow, blue and all the colors in between.
The result: 39 buildings all over town with murals on their walls – depicting the town’s history.
What a boon for artists! What a boon for business!
Unless you were driving through this place in Florida, you’d never guess that its name is Lake Placid. Doesn’t that name evoke images of water? Or of ice? Or of a colorful indoor plant named caladium?
Yes, yes, and another yes. One more? Libraries. More about that in a minute.
The idea of painting murals on buildings all over town is not unique, but it’s spreading. Lake Placid resident Bob Porter swiped the idea in the 1990s from Chemainus, British Columbia. Several other Florida towns also liked the idea, among them: Lake Wales, Punta Gorda, Milton and Palatka, where Billy Graham’s baptism is depicted.
Murals now overshadow Lake Placid’s slogan: ‘Caladium Capital of the World’, where more than 95 per cent of the world’s supply is grown.
What is caladium? It’s a popular indoor plant with colorful leaves. The 270-foot Placid tower, one of the Southeast’s tallest observation towers, is a perfect place to view the 1,200 acres of caladium.
If you’re from New York and you think there might be a connection to this place in Florida, you’d be right – and it’s a famous connection. Melvil Dewey is a name well-known to librarians. He invented the Dewey decimal system, used by librarians the country over to catalog their books.
Dewey, born in Adams Center, near Lake Placid, NY, liked to spend winters in Lake Stearns, FL, which in the 1920’s wasn’t too big and wasn’t well-known. Dewey decided to change the town’s name to Lake Placid (it DID have and DOES have a lot of lakes) in an attempt to entice Northerners to spend their winters in Lake Placid.
Though he didn’t live to see the full impact of his vision, this place in Florida (now a city) whose name he changed now attracts both ’snowbirds’ and permanent residents (2000 pop.: 1,668).
Copyright (c) 2009 Gene Ingle, an award-winning editor-writer-cartographer, is an expert on places to see in Florida. He has driven nearly a million miles in Florida researching places on maps you probably never heard of. This place in Florida is one of 213 featured in The Famous Florida Trivia Game available free at http://www.ebookserendipity.com – Test your knowledge of Florida free.
