Lake Placid, Highlands County: The Lake Stayed Lake Childs Until 1954

The federal government has ruled three times on what to call the 3,393-acre lake that sits between the villages of Lake Placid and Childs. In 1921 it was Childs Lake. In 1943 it was Lake Childs. The decision that made it Lake Placid is dated 1954, and the Geographic Names Information System record for the lake, feature 289014, adds a line about even that one: the decision was made in 1954, not promulgated until 1957.

The town had been Lake Placid since 1927.

Melvil Dewey came to Florida in 1926 and established a southern branch of the Lake Placid Club he had founded in the Adirondacks. In 1927 Walter Coachman offered him 3,300 acres of land at Lake Stearns. Dewey closed the deal, and less than a week later bought E. C. Stuart's Hotel Stearns for $75,000 and renamed it the Lake Placid Club Loj. Stuart had built that hotel the year before, south of town on the north shore of the water now called Lake Placid. On June 6, 1927, at Dewey's urging and with the consent of the Florida Legislature, the town stopped being Lake Stearns.

The instrument was chapter 12990, Special Acts of 1927, and the Florida Senate's index to the state's special and local laws from 1845 to 1970 files it under two headings. Under Lake Placid (Highlands): name changed from Lake Stearns, 1927, 12990. Under Lake Stearns (Highlands): abolishing municipality; name changed to Lake Placid, 1927, 12990. The act dissolved a town charter adopted two years earlier and wrote a new one. Lakes do not have charters.

Lake Stearns was the bigger water a few miles north, between about 3,700 and 3,800 acres depending on level, and the federal names record says it was named originally for Governor Marcellus Stearns, Florida's eleventh governor, who served in an acting capacity from March 18, 1874 to January 2, 1877. Both lake names were already in working use before Dewey bought anything. The Punta Gorda Herald of November 27, 1919 reported that surveyors were busy in the Lake Stearns section, that Jas. T. Hancock was laying off the town east of the railroad track, and that Mr. Tillis was subdividing Dr. R. C. McClellan's tract on Lake Childs. The Lake Childs Company was organized the following year to develop tracts of land.

On August 5, 1928 the gravure section of the Sunday Star ran a photograph credited to Jay Brown from Underwood & Underwood and placed it on Lake Stearns, Florida. The Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board, published in 1933 to collect every decision the board had rendered from its organization in 1890 through June 1932, gives the lake one line. Childs: lake, Highlands County, Fla.

Dewey died at Lake Placid, Florida, on December 26, 1931. In January 1943 the Board on Geographic Names issued fresh official decisions for both lakes, and both came back the old way: Lake Childs on January 1, Lake Stearns on January 4. The 1954 decisions are what moved them, twenty-seven years after the town changed. One assigned Lake Placid to the water Dewey's Loj stood on. The other made the governor's lake Lake June in Winter, on a record that still carries Lake Stearns, Lake Sterns and Lake June-in-Winter as variant names.

Water historically ran out of the north side of Lake June through Stearns Creek into Lake Francis, and on April 1, 1955 the U.S. Geological Survey began keeping daily records at a gage it listed as STEARNS CREEK NEAR LAKE PLACID FL, number 02271000. The names system still gives the primary map for feature 289014, Lake Placid, as the Childs quadrangle.