Moon Lake, New Port Richey: The Four Miles of Roses in the Pine Flats

Between 1934 and 1936, someone bedded 35,000 rose bushes around a lake northeast of New Port Richey — enough to ring the water with four miles of blooms. Alongside them went 11,000 palms, 70,000 amaryllis, 5,000 azaleas, and rare fruit trees and lilies planted in the lagoons to keep something flowering year-round. All of it went into a stretch of Pasco County pine flats that had been a hunting preserve.

The man behind it was Ed Haley, who owned the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater. His Moon Lake Company began developing the property in 1933 — a tract described in the historical marker as a 9,000-acre sportsman's paradise. Haley built the ranch out between 1933 and 1937, and by the time it opened, the grounds around the lodge held a public garden, walkways, a rodeo ring, and a lakeside dance floor big enough to compete with the other Florida garden attractions of the era.

A working dude ranch with rodeo and hunting, wrapped in an ornamental garden of tens of thousands of flowering plants, was the draw. Garden attractions dotted the state in the 1930s, and Moon Lake was planted on that scale.

Rex Beach, the novelist and screenwriter whose adventure stories were turned into films, stayed at Moon Lake. So did Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. At one point the Florida Legislature held an informal parley on the grounds — lawmakers gathering at a rose-ringed dude ranch in the Pasco backcountry to talk business away from the capital.

The property carried a nationally known reputation as a game preserve. Accounts put its origins as a hunting operation as early as 1929, before Haley formalized the resort, and describe it as one of the more expansive hunting preserves of its time. Haley added the garden, the lodge, the rodeo ring, and the dance floor between 1933 and 1937.

None of the roses are there now. The name survives in the ground: Moon Lake is an unincorporated community and census place in Pasco County, with a population of about 4,800 as of the 2020 census, and Moon Lake Road runs through it. The neighborhood that grew up on the old ranch land is called Moon Lake Estates.

In September 2018, Pasco County closed Moon Lake Park after water levels rose fast enough to alarm homeowners around the shore. That same year, a fifteen-foot-wide sinkhole opened in the Moon Lake area along Pearl Drive, roughly ten feet deep in the backyard of two mobile homes, and four homes evacuated voluntarily. The Southwest Florida Water Management District has published minimum and guidance levels for the lake.

In February 2019, neighbors organized a second Moon Lake cleanup, working through an area that had struggled with illegal dumping and code violations.

The historical marker in New Port Richey stands where the dude ranch stood. It records a 9,000-acre sportsman's paradise, development begun in 1933 by Ed Haley's Moon Lake Company.