Lake Louisa, Clermont: The Mustang on the Bottom

The drought of 2001 was the worst Central Florida had seen in decades, and as the water in Lake Louisa fell, something dark broke the surface near the southern shoreline. It was the tail of a P-51 Mustang. The plane had been there since November 1944.

The pilot was Second Lieutenant Frederick Gilmore, flying out of Bartow Army Air Field. He was twenty-three years old the day he went into the lake — it was his birthday. By then he had already flown twenty-nine combat missions over Africa and Italy with the 111th Reconnaissance Squadron and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He had survived the war overseas and come home to a training assignment in Florida. The crash that killed him happened on a routine flight over the ridge country south of Clermont.

For fifty-seven years the Mustang sat underwater. Lake Louisa is the southern anchor of the Clermont Chain, fed by clean water moving down through the Green Swamp toward the headwaters of the Palatlakaha River. Boats and anglers crossed the south end over it.

Louisa sits high. The Clermont Chain runs along the spine of the Lake Wales Ridge, and these are some of the highest-elevation lakes in peninsular Florida. They depend almost entirely on rainfall and shallow groundwater rather than on any large inflowing river. When the rain stops, the lakes drop fast. In 2001, Louisa dropped far enough to put the tail section in daylight.

The crash is recorded at the Museum of Florida History, which lists Gilmore among the Florida sites where wartime training accidents took the lives of young pilots. Bartow Army Air Field, about forty miles south, was one of dozens of training installations that filled the state during the war, and men learned to fly fighters over the lakes and pastures of Central Florida. Florida lake bottoms still hold a number of those aircraft. Louisa's is one of the few that has surfaced, and it surfaced only briefly.

The state park on the southwestern shore covers 4,372 acres, with longleaf pine restoration on land that used to be citrus groves, cypress cabins, and a paddling route up through Lake Susan toward Minnehaha. The Clermont Chain is designated Outstanding Florida Waters.

The rains returned and the water rose back over the tail section. The Mustang is still on the bottom.