Lake Placid, Highlands County: The Town Melvil Dewey Renamed

The town in southern Highlands County was called Lake Stearns when it became an official municipality on December 1, 1925. Two years later it had a different name, and the man who supplied it was Melvil Dewey, whose decimal classification had reorganized public library shelves across the country.

Dewey had founded the Lake Placid Club up in the Adirondacks of New York, a members-only resort on the shore of the real Lake Placid. He opened a Florida winter branch in the lake country of southern Highlands County, and he convinced the town — and the state — to change the name of Lake Stearns to Lake Placid, borrowing the name of his northern resort wholesale. He had tried, for a while, to spell his own last name "Dui," and dropped the idea.

The Seminole occupied this stretch of the ridge before homesteaders began moving in around 1909. One of the first white settlers was Joshua Berrien Lastinger. A family photograph of him survives from 1904, twenty-one years before the town was incorporated and twenty-three before it took Dewey's name.

This is the Lake Wales Ridge running down through Highlands County, and the water here sits in sinkholes. One of the lakes near town reaches down 90 feet. Sinkholes still open here. In August 2012 one formed near a store on Main Street and swept lakeside equipment into Mirror Lake.

Citrus came first, thousands of acres of groves running out among the lakes. The Lake Placid Tower went up during the heyday of that industry, built to give a view out over the groves and the water. The caladium bulb came later, and the town is known as the Caladium Capital of the World.