April 25, 2026
Lake Lulu, Winter Haven: The 1966 Park That Opened the Chain
Before Winter Haven had a public park on its chain of lakes, it had to build one — and the lake they chose was Lulu
In 1966 the city of Winter Haven built Chain of Lakes Park on Lake Lulu, at the southern end of a water system it had been dredging for half a century. For a resident without lakefront property, the relationship with the water up to then had mostly been a matter of driving past it. The park was the first public ground on the chain: a place to fish from shore and a launch into the southern lakes. Anyone could fish it or put a boat in without owning a foot of shoreline.
The canals came first. Winter Haven started digging them in 1915, and they produced one of the most unusual navigable freshwater systems in Florida. Put a boat in at one lake and you can wind through a half-dozen others by way of narrow, hand-dug channels without ever setting it back on a trailer. The system was built for drainage and flood control, and later for the convenience of the property owners whose lots backed up to the water. Public access came last.
For the first half of the twentieth century the lakes belonged in practice to the people already on them. Citrus growers backed up to them. Families who arrived early got their names attached to the shorelines. Dick Pope turned Lake Eloise into a stage set for water-ski spectacles at Cypress Gardens. The chain was famous, and the fame belonged to private interests. Winter Haven had more than fifty lakes, depending on who was counting and how wet the year had been, and no municipal park on any of them.
The northern chain lakes had been drawing the attention since the canals were first dug. Lulu, at the other end, sits at the seam between the southern chain and the rest of Winter Haven's waterways, tied to both by the same canal system that had been knitting the lakes together for decades. The city put it on Lulu rather than on Eloise or Howard, the lakes that already had the attention. The park went in along the southern and western edges, and that shoreline is public. The north and northeast shore is lined with private residences, the way most Winter Haven lakes are.
The lake is an odd shape, which is part of what makes it interesting from the water. Lulu comes to a point at its east and west ends — wide through the middle, tapering to narrow tips where the canals and the shoreline close in, closer to a lens than to an oval. Sources put it somewhere between 280 and 315 acres, a spread that has as much to do with water level as with measurement. In Polk County the difference between wet season and dry can move a shoreline.
The name is one the record does not settle. Many Winter Haven lakes carry the surnames of families who homesteaded near them in the 1880s and 1890s — the Eycleshimers, the Jacksons, the Sykes — arriving before the town was incorporated in 1911, and Lulu may have come the same way. Whether it was a surname or a given name, a daughter or a wife, does not surface clearly in the available record.
The southern chain has always drawn different traffic than the northern lakes. The northern chain got the spring training camps, the Boston Red Sox and later the Cleveland Indians, along with more of the tourism and more of the development pressure. The southern lakes got anglers working largemouth bass in the two-to-five-pound range, and crappie fishermen along the edges in the cooler months.
The canal running north out of Lulu opens into Lake Shipp, on the route the 1915 dredging cut to turn a scattering of separate lakes into a single navigable system.
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