October 6, 2026
Mountain Lake, Lake Wales: The Winter Home That Led to Bok Tower
Bok Tower sits on Iron Mountain because a Philadelphia magazine editor first bought a winter-home lot on the 92-acre private lake next door, and hired the lake colony's landscape architect
In September 1914, a Baltimore developer named Frederick S. Ruth wrote to Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. about a 2,500-acre tract he had bought in Polk County. Two thousand of those acres were going into oranges and grapefruit. The remaining five hundred were for a country club, a golf course, a tourists' hotel and winter homes. Ruth had lived in Roland Park, the Olmsted-planned neighborhood in Baltimore, and he brought the firm in at the inception of the project.
What he was planning became Mountain Lake Colony, the private community north of the City of Lake Wales. The preliminary plan spread large lots across fifty blocks around the lake and gave the property a golf course laid out by Seth Raynor. Olmsted Brothers designed the majority of Mountain Lake between 1915 and 1925, and by the late 1930s the firm had worked on more than 120 separate residential projects inside the colony, house by house, for the people who bought in.
The sanctuary that became Bok Tower Gardens grew directly out of that residential work, according to the National Park Service's account of its creation.
Olmsted walked the property and filed a memorandum on what he found. The rows of orange trees already in the ground struck him as monotonous. He also took note of the hilltop next door. "I was first inclined to smile at the idea of calling a hill about three hundred feet high 'Iron Mountain,'" he wrote. "It seemed a sort of Floridian joke upon the prevailing flatness of the rest of the State."
Seven years later, Edward W. Bok, the former editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, became an Olmsted client. In 1921 the firm began planning the landscape for the winter home Bok was about to build at Mountain Lake, working from a model of the house that the architect E. M. Parsons supplied. Olmsted advised him on where to place it, and the existing pines, oaks and palmetto stands were kept.
Within a year of building that house, Bok bought 61 acres on Iron Mountain, the adjacent hilltop. It was a short climb from his new winter home. He hired Olmsted to design it as the Mountain Lake Sanctuary, and the planting was done partly to bring birds in: blueberries, gallberries and Suriname cherries, shrubs introduced for the food and cover they would offer migrating birds.
The tower came after the planting. Milton Medary designed it, in pink marble from Georgia and fossil-laden coquina quarried near Saint Augustine. Its 60 bells were cast in England and installed in 1928, the smallest 11 pounds and the largest almost 12 tons, together covering nearly five octaves. The Sanctuary and its Singing Tower were dedicated in 1929. In January 1930, less than a year after that dedication, Bok died, and he was buried at the base of the carillon rather than in the Bok family lot at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Among the drawings in the Olmsted job file for the Mountain Lake Corporation is plan 457, titled as a study for a bathhouse and boat landing in Polk County, drawn at a scale of twenty feet to the inch.
Mountain Lake covers 92 acres. The water management district kept a gauge on it from October 1983 through December 2011, and across 4,736 readings the stage ranged from 103.65 to 113.91 feet, close to ten feet of movement. The last reading on that record, 106.83 feet, was taken on December 30, 2011.
Mountain Lake Estates was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 26, 1993, an 896-acre historic district carrying reference number 93000871.
Sources
Every factual claim in this story was checked against the page it came from before the story was saved. These are those pages. Our standards are on the masthead.
- Mountain Lake Corporation, Olmsted Job #06081 — Olmsted Network
- The Creation and Legacy of Florida's Mountain Lake Sanctuary and the Bok Singing Tower (Dennis Montagna, National Park Service)
- Mountain Lake, Florida — Wikipedia
- Mountain Lake, Polk County, FL: Water Quality — LakeQuality.org
- Mountain Lake (N Of Lake Wales) | Lake Details — Polk County Water Atlas
Presented by
Own waterfront in Mulberry?
Lake history is interesting. Shoreline conditions are practical. Horizon Marine builds docks, seawalls, and shoreline protection on Mulberry's lakes — and gives a straight answer on what your property actually needs.
Peace River, Fort Meade: The Thirteen Miles Where the River Drains Into the Ground
Between Bartow and Fort Meade the Peace River loses water into holes in its own bed — on one day in June 2002 the USGS measured about 32 million gallons going into the ground — and Fort Meade is where the leaking stops
Read →
North Prong Alafia River, Mulberry: The 154 Snook That Started the Repair
When 1997's acid spill came down Skinned Sapling Creek into the North Prong, the first act of repair on the Alafia was a release of exactly 154 juvenile snook
Read →
Lake Elbert, Winter Haven: The Hillside That Was Meant to Be America's Largest Modernist Neighborhood
Ten glass-walled houses opened on the grapefruit-grove crest above Lake Elbert's east shore in March 1957, and 10,000 people walked through them that first weekend — the opening installment of a modernist development that stopped at ten.
Read →
Edward Medard Reservoir, Plant City: The Drawdown That Fed the Food Banks
When Hillsborough County's busiest reservoir was emptied in 2009 to rebuild its eroding bank, more than 1,300 of the stranded tilapia and catfish were filleted and sent to local food banks
Read →
Building on Mountain Lake or another Mulberry lake?
Free waterfront assessment · License #SCC131154313