May 30, 2026
Lake Ashton, Lake Wales: The Private Lake That Straddles Two Cities
The 369-acre private lake in Lake Wales sits at the center of a 55-and-older community that straddles two cities — and a few years back, a CNN crew came down to film it
Most lakes in Polk County belong to a single town. Lake Ashton belongs to two. The 369-acre private water sits on a municipal line that runs straight through the community built around it — part of the lake and the houses on its shore fall inside Lake Wales, part inside Winter Haven. The address you give a delivery driver depends on which side of the rooflines you live on.
That two-city footprint is a quirk of how the place came together. Lake Ashton is a 55-and-older deed-restricted golf community, and the Lake Ashton Community Development District was created in 2000 by Ordinance 2000-11 of the City of Lake Wales — one of those special-purpose local governments authorized under Chapter 190 of the Florida Statutes to plan, acquire, operate, and maintain the infrastructure of a master-planned development. The lake itself is listed as private on the Polk County Water Atlas, WBID 1590B, sitting in the Peace River Basin.
The community started filling up in the early 2000s. A November 2002 Ledger story on the development quoted a couple, the Pelletiers, who had come down from Connecticut two months earlier and were renting a manufactured home in Four Lakes in Winter Haven while they waited to move into Lake Ashton full-time. That was the pattern — northerners arriving in waves, the houses going up fast enough that the paper covered Lake Ashton as a driver of regional growth.
Fast growth and new construction in mid-2000s Florida came with a problem nobody saw coming. In February 2010, The Ledger reported that an AmeriSpec inspector named Michael Woodard had evaluated roughly 100 homes in Lake Ashton and identified 13 with Chinese drywall — the imported wallboard that off-gassed sulfur compounds, corroded copper wiring and air-conditioning coils, and matched criteria the Florida Department of Health had laid out, including metal corrosion and manufacturer markings. Residents went public with their complaints against the developer. The drywall problem was a national story by then, but it landed here, in houses built around a private Polk County lake, the same way it landed in subdivisions across the state.
Two years after the drywall story, the community picked up a different headline. In 2012, Lake Ashton was named the winner of the Florida Communities of Excellence Award for civic volunteerism and advocacy. Community Director Tricia Adams accepted the award on the community's behalf. Four years after that, CNN came calling. In June 2016, The Ledger reported that Lake Ashton had been selected, after a nationwide search of 55-and-over communities, to be featured on a show hosted by W. Kamau Bell.
The lake those cameras came to film is private — not in the loose sense of "hard to launch on," but in the formal water-atlas sense. There is no public ramp. The shoreline belongs to the community and the CDD that maintains it. A separate phase called The Preserve at Lake Ashton has been planned with around 130 acres of natural wetlands and conservation space, which gives some sense of how the development reads the land around the water: buildable lots on one side of the line, retained wetland on the other.
What people on the lake actually do, day to day, the community itself has documented. A Nextdoor page for the neighborhood lists the residents' top interests as home improvement and DIY, walking, gardening and landscape, books, dogs, cards and board games, crafts and sewing, travel, golf, and road trips. It's not a fishing-tournament lake or a ski lake. It's a lake that anchors a golf community whose residents walk its perimeter, garden its lots, and drive in and out of two different cities depending on which gate they use.
The CDD still files its public notices the way Chapter 190 districts have to — meeting agendas, budget hearings, the standard warning that under Florida law, e-mail addresses sent to the entity are public records. The municipal line still runs through the property. The 369 acres of water still sit, by atlas designation, private.
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