May 6, 2026
Lake Louisa, Clermont: The Mustang on the Bottom
In 2001, drought pulled the water down far enough to show the tail of a P-51 Mustang that had been resting on the bottom of Lake Louisa since November 1944
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 in maybe twenty-some feet of water, mostly forgotten outside the Gilmore family and a few old-timers who remembered what had happened. 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. It is deep enough in places, and quiet enough on the south end, that an aluminum airframe could rest undisturbed under a working fishery. People skied over it. People fished over it. Nobody knew.
What made the discovery possible was the specific geography of this lake. 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 that what had been hidden for half a century broke into daylight.
The crash itself 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 — a generation of men learning to fly fighters over the lakes and pastures of Central Florida, some of them never leaving. The state's lake bottoms still hold a number of these aircraft. Louisa's is one of the few that has surfaced, and only briefly.
The lake came back. The rains returned, the water rose, and the Mustang went under again. It is still there.
Most of what gets said about Lake Louisa today is about the state park — 4,372 acres along the southwestern shore, the longleaf pine restoration on land that used to be citrus groves, the cypress cabins, the paddling route up through Lake Susan toward Minnehaha. The water here is genuinely clean by Central Florida standards; the Clermont Chain is designated Outstanding Florida Waters, and the surrounding Green Swamp feeds the Floridan Aquifer that most of the region drinks from. It is a beautiful lake on a ridge above a swamp that supplies a state with water.
But there is also a P-51 on the bottom, and a young man's name attached to it, and a single afternoon in 2001 when the lake gave up enough of itself to remind anyone watching that what looks like recreational water has a longer memory than that. Gilmore had flown twenty-nine missions over two continents at war. He came home to Florida and went down on a training flight on his birthday. The lake kept him.
Next time you are out on the south end of Louisa — past the state park boat ramp, where the shoreline runs quiet and the cypress lean in — you are probably passing over him. The fishing is good there. The water is clear enough, on a calm morning, that you can see a fair way down. Not all the way. Not far enough.
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