May 5, 2026
East Lake Tohopekaliga, St. Cloud: The Lake That Grew Florida's First Sugar Mill
Before St. Cloud was a town, the south shore of East Lake Tohopekaliga held the first sugar factory ever built in Florida
Stand on the St. Cloud lakefront today and you're looking at water that, in the 1880s, was the working edge of an industrial experiment. Hamilton Disston — Philadelphia saw manufacturer, fishing tourist, and at one point the largest single private landowner in the United States — chose the south shore of East Lake Tohopekaliga to build the first sugar factory in Florida. Everything that came after in this town, and a fair amount of what came after in Florida agriculture, traces back to that decision.
Disston had been coming down to fish the Kissimmee chain since the 1870s. By 1881 he had cut a deal with the state for four million acres at twenty-five cents an acre, an arrangement that pulled Florida out of bankruptcy and handed Disston a kingdom of palmetto, sawgrass, and shallow water. He wanted to drain it, and he wanted to plant cane on it. The trial ground was Southport, on the south end of Lake Tohopekaliga, where early sugarcane plots did well enough to convince him the soil and climate would carry a serious operation.
The serious operation went up at St. Cloud Plantation, on East Lake Toho. The mill could process cane into raw sugar on site — the first time that had been done at industrial scale in the state. Cane fields spread back from the lake. Workers came in. A small settlement grew around the factory, and the lake itself served as both water source and transport corridor; the Kissimmee chain, after Disston's dredging, ran navigable from here south to Lake Okeechobee.
For a few years it worked. Florida cane competed, on paper, with Louisiana and Cuba. Disston drew federal agricultural inspectors down to look at the operation. Then the weather turned, the freezes of the mid-1890s wrecked the fields, Disston's finances collapsed, and in 1896 he died in Philadelphia. The St. Cloud Plantation mill went quiet. The cane fields went back to pasture and palmetto.
What replaced it is the strange second chapter most St. Cloud residents do know, even if they don't connect it to the sugar story. In 1909 the Grand Army of the Republic — the Union veterans' fraternal organization — bought a large piece of the old Disston holdings and platted a retirement colony for Civil War veterans. They came by the thousands. That's why Mount Peace Cemetery, a few blocks from the lake, holds the remains of more than four hundred Union soldiers, one of the largest concentrations of Union Civil War burials anywhere in the country. A Pennsylvania industrialist's failed sugar venture left behind cleared, drained, surveyed land — and a New England veterans' association built a town on top of it.
The lake itself kept doing what lakes do. Boggy Creek, rising up by what is now Orlando International Airport, feeds in from the north. Canal 31 connects the south end to Big Toho, and from there the water keeps moving south toward Okeechobee along the path Disston's dredges first opened. East Lake Toho stayed the quieter sibling — twelve thousand acres to Big Toho's twenty-three thousand, less tournament pressure, clearer water in the winter months, a bass fishery that locals talk up precisely because it doesn't draw the crowds the bigger lake does.
The lake has had its modern industrial moments too. Powerboat racers ran the Florida State Offshore Championships here in 1989. The Runnymede Road bridge collapsed during the 1990 drawdown when loose sand undercut the structure. The beach was closed for bacteria in 1991 after stormwater pipes dumped road runoff onto the swimming area. A long-running FWC habitat enhancement project, building on the drawdown methods proven up the chain at Big Toho, has been working the shoreline since 2019, scraping muck and replanting native vegetation.
But the founding fact sits right under the lakefront park. The grid of St. Cloud, the cemetery full of Union dead, the canal that lets a bass boat run from here to Okeechobee — all of it grows out of a sugar mill that operated for barely a decade on the south shore of this lake. Florida's sugar industry, which now means Clewiston and Belle Glade and a million acres south of the big lake, started here, in Osceola County, on a lake most people drive past without slowing down.
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