Lake Gertrude, Mount Dora: Who Controls the Water

To understand why Lake Gertrude ended up at the center of that fight, it helps to know that this particular shore has been a gathering place for people from outside town since before Mount Dora was Mount Dora. In 1886, Dr. W. F. Henry donated ten acres of land immediately south of the lake to the South Florida Sunday School Assembly of Mount Dora. The Assembly belonged to the Chautauqua movement, the lakeside summer-camp tradition that drew families to the water for lectures, music and instruction. People came from elsewhere to be on this shore. The land Henry gave was meant to bring them.

So the lake that homeowners in 2008 wanted to keep for themselves had, more than a century earlier, been the engine that pulled outsiders in. The Sunday School Assembly's ten acres helped seed the town that grew up around the water. The town came because the lake was a place worth gathering at.

That history doesn't settle the 2008 question, and the commissioners didn't settle it quickly either. The homeowners' concerns — crowds, trash, the risk of someone getting hurt on water they considered their own — are the concerns that surface anywhere a private-feeling lake is asked to become a public one. The county's position, through Stewart, was that scenic water of that size shouldn't be closed to a man with a canoe.

What makes Lake Gertrude's version of that argument worth remembering is the symmetry. The same shore that one century used to invite the public in was, in the next, the ground on which the public's right to be there got contested. Henry's donation in 1886 was an act of opening — handing ten acres to an organization whose entire purpose was bringing people to the lakeside. The 2008 debate was about whether to keep the water closed.

Mount Dora grew out of that opened shore. The Chautauqua gatherings that met on Henry's donated land helped establish the town, and the town's reputation as a place people travel to has held for well over a hundred years. The lake is still 248 acres of it, still scenic, still in the middle of everything.

The 2008 fight over canoes and kayaks was a small one by the standards of Lake County's bigger water battles. But it asked a question that Henry had answered, in his own way, in 1886: the value of a shore like this is in who gets to stand on it. He gave ten acres away so that more people could. More than a century later, the people who lived on the water were being asked whether they'd do the same with the water itself.