Lake Silver, Winter Haven: When the Ferris Wheel Turned Above the Shore

The Strates company was a serious operation. James E. Strates ran one of the larger railroad-based carnival shows in the country, the kind that moved town to town by train and could put up a midway in a day. When they came to Winter Haven they came with the double Ferris wheel — two wheels stacked on a single axis, taller than anything around it, the kind of ride that drew people from across the county just to look at it. Photographs from the era show crowds funneling through the 1949 entrance gate. Behind them, the wheel turns over Lake Silver.

The why of Lake Silver specifically is partly accident and partly geography. The Exposition grounds sat on the lake's edge because that was the land the city had available — open ground near downtown, big enough to host pavilions and rides and parking for the crowds. The water made for a backdrop that read well on camera and in the souvenir photographs visitors took home. For a few weeks each winter, a residential lake on the northern chain became the photographic shorthand for Winter Haven itself.

The Exposition faded, the way most mid-century civic festivals did. Television, which had once amplified the event nationally, eventually undercut the reason to travel for it. Cypress Gardens down on Lake Eloise grew into the region's year-round draw and pulled the cultural gravity south. The carnival stopped coming. The pavilions came down. By the time most of the current shoreline homes were built, the Exposition was already a memory held mostly by people who had been children when the Ferris wheel was lit.

What's left is the lake itself, and the depth that surprises people who learn it for the first time. Forty-five feet is unusual in this part of Florida — most of the chain lakes are shallow, ten to fifteen feet through the middle, products of dissolved limestone and shifting water tables. Lake Silver goes deeper because the karst feature underneath it goes deeper. The clarity that probably gave the lake its name comes partly from that depth and partly from a spring-fed reputation that locals have repeated for generations.

Bob Griffiths, who has run the Lake Region Lakes Management District for decades, grew up a stone's throw from Lake Silver. He would have been a boy when the Ferris wheel was still turning. The kids who watched it from their backyards are now the generation that remembers, and after them the story belongs to old photographs and a few paragraphs in the back issues of local magazines.

Stand on a public road-end on a January evening now and the lake is dark. Houselights on the far shore. No music. No wheel. But the ground you're standing on was once the edge of the loudest week of the year in Winter Haven, and the water in front of you was the picture they sent out to the rest of the country.