Shops on Park

This guide starts in 1882, when John Ergood and Robert White nailed together the first shop on a sandy track through the pines, its loft strung with lamps as the only ballroom for miles around. It reaches back two years earlier to the Massachusetts land speculators who bet that the name Winter Park alone could pull wealthy northerners south, paying thirteen thousand dollars for six hundred acres of lakeside pine. Listen for how that gamble shaped the ground beneath the oaks overhead.