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

The James E. Strates carnival company set up a double Ferris wheel and a full midway on the shore of Lake Silver for the Florida Citrus Exposition. Banquet tents, parade floats staged on side streets, radio crews running cable, and later television cameras broadcasting the whole thing to the rest of the country. For a stretch of years in the mid-twentieth century, a small residential lake on Winter Haven's northern chain was the site of the state's biggest annual celebration of the fruit that built it.

Most people who live near Lake Silver now know it as quiet water. Forty-five feet deep at its deepest point, according to the Polk Water Atlas, with a private shoreline and not much public access. There is no plaque. Nothing remains of the midway.

The Florida Citrus Exposition was Winter Haven's claim on the citrus industry. Displays of fresh fruit packed into pavilions, judged and arranged into elaborate constructions. Parades down Central Avenue. Banquets with speeches. National radio hookups, and eventually television. And on the lakefront, a traveling carnival.

The Strates company was a serious operation — 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. What they brought to Winter Haven included the double Ferris wheel, two wheels stacked on a single axis, taller than anything around it. Photographs from the era show crowds funneling through the 1949 entrance gate, the wheel turning behind them over Lake Silver.

The Exposition grounds sat on the lake's edge because that was the land the city had available: open ground near downtown, big enough for pavilions, rides, and parking. The water made a backdrop that read well on camera and in the souvenir photographs visitors carried home. For a few weeks each winter, a residential lake on the northern chain was the photographic shorthand for Winter Haven itself.

The Exposition faded, the way most mid-century civic festivals did. Cypress Gardens, down on Lake Eloise, grew into the region's year-round draw. The carnival stopped coming. The pavilions came down. By the time most of the current shoreline homes were built, the Exposition was held mostly in the memory of people who had been children when the Ferris wheel was lit.

Bob Griffiths, who has run the Lake Region Lakes Management District for decades, grew up near Lake Silver. The generation that watched the wheel from their backyards is the generation that remembers it; after them, the record is old photographs and a few paragraphs in the back issues of local magazines.

What's left is the lake, and a depth that surprises people who hear it for the first time. Forty-five feet is unusual in this part of Florida. Most of the chain lakes run ten to fifteen feet through the middle, shaped by dissolved limestone and shifting water tables. Lake Silver goes deeper because the karst feature beneath it goes deeper.