Rattlesnake Lake, Winter Haven: The $50,000 Name Change

The 86-acre private lake in Winter Haven that still shows up on the Polk County Water Atlas as Rattlesnake Lake has a neighbor that used to share the name. The neighbor is now called Lake Ashton. The reason it isn't called Rattlesnake anymore is that a developer named Maxwell spent about $50,000 in legal fees to change it.

That's the whole story, and it's a stranger story than it sounds. You don't usually pay a five-figure legal bill to rename a lake. You file a request, the right boards consider it, and either it happens or it doesn't. Maxwell's bill suggests it didn't go smoothly. By the time it was done, the lake had a new name, the gated community on its shoreline had a sellable identity, and Maxwell — according to his own account in The Ledger — wasn't sure he'd do it again. He called it an involved process.

What makes this worth telling isn't the renaming itself. Plenty of Florida lakes have shed older names for prettier ones. It's that the same developer, having gone through all that to escape the word "Rattlesnake," then turned around and started developing the actual Rattlesnake Lake next door. The one that kept its name. The one still listed in the state's water body database under WBID 1590C, 86 acres, private, in Winter Haven.

So there are now two adjacent lakes in southwest Polk County telling two different stories about the same word. One was scrubbed clean at considerable expense. The other was left alone. The marketing logic that justified $50,000 in legal fees on the first parcel apparently didn't apply to the second — or the second was far enough along, or small enough, or private enough, that the cost-benefit math came out differently.

There's a longer history sitting underneath all of this. Rattlesnake as a Florida lake name isn't decorative. The Orlando Sentinel, writing in 2002, noted an 1895 map of Orange County that already showed a Rattlesnake Lake east of the South Florida Railroad tracks running through Longwood and Altamonte Springs. The snakes were a fact of the landscape before the surveyors got there, and the surveyors wrote down what the locals told them. Polk County's Rattlesnake Lake fits the same pattern — a working name attached to a piece of water by people who had reason to know what lived in the scrub around it.

Winter Haven has spent a century turning that older Florida into something else. Cypress Gardens opened on Lake Eloise in 1936 and showed the rest of the country what the chain of lakes could be made to look like with enough landscaping and enough water-ski choreography. Rattlesnakes themselves became a roadside attraction elsewhere in the state — milked for venom at roundups, raced against gopher tortoises at festivals. The animal stayed; the name became something developers preferred to work around.

Maxwell's $50,000 is the price of that preference, made visible. It's what it costs, in legal time and filings and procedural patience, to detach a piece of waterfront from a word that's been attached to it since at least the 1890s. Lake Ashton sells houses. Rattlesnake Lake doesn't, or doesn't sell the same houses to the same buyers, or doesn't fit on the gate sign the same way.

The lake that kept the name is still there, 86 acres, fed and bordered the way it always was, recorded in two regional water atlases under the same designation. Maxwell's second project, the one on Rattlesnake itself, is the part of the story that's still being written on the ground. Whether that lake eventually gets renamed too — whether the math changes once the houses are built and the marketing begins — isn't in the record yet. For now there are two lakes side by side, one with a developer's name and one with the older one, and a roughly $50,000 gap between them.