Lake Beauclair, Tavares: The Lake That Carries a Founder's Borrowed Name

Beauclair is French. Beau clair — beautiful and clear. The man who acquired the land at the edge of the Harris Chain and laid out the town of Tavares beside it was named Alexander St. Clair-Abrams. St. Clair. Beau Clair. The lake and the founder carry the same name, one of them translated. Look at a map of the lakes and waterways near Tavares and it is there, west of the town he laid out.

Abrams arrived in Florida around 1875, a newspaper editor and railroad promoter from a Creole family in New Orleans. He was an attorney, a Confederate veteran, and a land speculator. By 1880, he had acquired half-interest in the land that would become Tavares, positioned along the shore of Lake Dora where rail and water transport could intersect. He named the settlement after a Portuguese ancestor, the surname Tavares coming from somewhere in his family's Iberian lineage.

Within two years of arriving at his chosen site, Abrams had purchased full ownership, built the Peninsular Hotel, established a sawmill, put up mercantile stores, and started working the political and financial angles to bring railroad service to what was still barely a settlement. He was building a town from scratch. A post office came in 1883. By 1884, a hotel, three stores, the sawmill, and eight cottages stood where recently there had been nothing but scrub pine and lake shore.

Lake Beauclair sits at a critical juncture in the Harris Chain of Lakes. It is the connector — the lake that links Lake Dora and Lake Carlton to the west with the Apopka-Beauclair Canal system to the east. Everything that moved through the chain by water moved through Beauclair. While Abrams was working the angles to bring rail to Tavares, the water route was already in place: a navigable link between the larger lakes of the chain and, ultimately, the Ocklawaha River watershed that drained toward the St. Johns and the Atlantic. The lock systems that connect Lake Griffin to Lake Eustis, and the canals that thread the chain together, are the rest of that network. Beauclair is the lake you pass through whether you are heading north or south.

Beauclair covers roughly 1,134 acres, which does not make it the largest lake in the chain. It has been one of the chain's more troubled. Nutrient loading from Lake Apopka — itself one of Florida's better-known cases of agricultural runoff and ecological collapse — flows into Beauclair through the canal system. For decades, what came through that canal was essentially fertilized water, rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, and it turned Beauclair green.

In 2012, a major dredging project was undertaken to pull nutrient-laden muck from the lake bottom, an attempt to undo decades of accumulated damage. The effort was part of the broader, ongoing work to restore the Harris Chain, which depends on each link in the system being healthy enough to pass clean water to the next. A hundred and forty-five years after Abrams bought his half-interest, both names are still on the map.