The Man Who Carried the Paper to Fort Meade

In 1892 the handful of families living on the north shore of Lake Clinch, in Polk County, filled out an application for a United States post office. The paper could not go straight to Washington. It had to pass through the postmaster at Fort Meade, who held the head of the mail route. Joseph Washington Carson offered to carry it over. His offer was accepted and he left with the application in his hands. The name written on it was Lakemont.

Walter H. Overocker, who had come down from Washington, D.C., that same year and who was to be the postmaster, opened his commission and read a different word. He had been appointed postmaster of Frostproof. His daughter, Margaret Overocker Reeves, set the account down for the Polk County Historical Quarterly in 1975: her father was very angry, and he suspected the name had been substituted somewhere between the settlement and Fort Meade. Reeves dated the office exactly — established December 8, 1892, under the name Frostproof — and noted that the U.S. Post Office Department had supplied her dates and that postmarks in her own possession confirmed them.

Carson had qualified as a real estate agent. Reeves wrote that he suggested Frostproof because he believed the name would be good advertising for his business, and that the other settlers overruled him. What they submitted instead, Lakemont, was meant to indicate a place among the lakes and hills.

What they had wanted first was Keystone City, and that was already the name on the ground. George W. Hendry of Fort Meade built the first house on the east shore of the lake in the early 1880s, a log cabin north of the drain that he and his friends used on hunting and fishing trips and that his cowboys used while working his cattle. Hendry and several associates bought the land on either side of the drain, had it surveyed, cut it into four-acre blocks with streets between them, and recorded the plat as Keystone City. The Post Office Department would not take the name. Reeves wrote that Overocker was told there was already a post office called Keystone Heights in the state. The National Register nomination for the old Frostproof High School says the Postmaster General refused the petition because of a town of similar name, Keystone Heights, near Jacksonville. The Ledger, reporting Bea Reifeis's research in 2014 and 2018, names the rival as Keystone Park. The accounts do not agree on which Keystone was in the way.

The word Frostproof was older than the paperwork. Reeves wrote that the cowboys who wintered cattle in that high lake country, where frost turned the grass brown in the lowlands, were said to have called it Frostproof. Before that the section was known as Old Fort Clinch, after a fort established during the Indian wars of 1849 to 1858. Lake Clinch had been Lake Locha-Popka until it was renamed for General Duncan Clinch.

Carson's father, the Rev. Stephen W. Carson, brought the first permanent settlers. In September 1886 the family left Fort Meade for a rough lumber house twelve feet by fifteen, an eighteen-by-thirty-six-foot tent, and land cleared down to the lake shore. The nearest settlement was Midland, seven miles west on the road to Fort Meade. Six years passed before the next permanent resident came. In 1892 two more arrived with their families: B. M. Hampton, who had been at Avon Park, and Overocker.

The first recorded freezes came two years after the name, on December 29, 1894, and February 8, 1895, and Reeves wrote that afterward there was much displeasure over it. When another freeze struck in 1898, all the men of the community met to discuss the matter. Almost all of them agreed that Frostproof was misleading, that it was being used dishonestly in advertising, and that it should go. A petition went to the Post Office Department asking for Lakemont, and on February 14, 1898, the request was granted. The nomination form calls that the first friction among the residents.

The plat was still recorded as Keystone City. Reifeis, who wrote Frostproof Treasures: The History of Frostproof, Florida to 1910 and who took over the directorship of the Frostproof Historical Museum, put the tangle plainly to The Ledger in 2014: "For a little while, the area known as Frostproof today had three different names: Frostproof, Lakemont and Keystone City."

In the Florida Agriculturist of August 30, 1899, the DeLand paper reprinted a letter to the Bartow Courier-Informant from Byran S. Ashley, as the paper spelled his name. Ashley described standing ten days earlier in Mr. Hampton's pinery at Frostproof, Smooth Cayenne pineapples set at a rate that would take about ten thousand to the acre and netting twenty-five cents apiece without the crown, and wrote that the acrimony displayed by residents of other places indicated something like envy of the prosperity of Frostproof. The post office that handled his mail that month was Lakemont.

Reeves wrote that the people who wanted Frostproof back never gave up, and that after eight years they succeeded: on August 24, 1906, Lakemont became Frostproof again. The population at the end of the century had been thirty. In August 1918 the town held an election to incorporate and the vote was twenty-eight to twenty in favor. The first ordinance it passed regulated the speed of vehicles inside the city limits.

Who changed the word on the application is still argued. Reifeis employed a handwriting expert who determined that Carson was the designated writer of that 1892 change, and her book also raises the possibility that he arranged it with the postmaster at Midland, John Burleigh, rather than altering the paper himself on the road. A separate account has Burleigh suggesting Frostproof outright and rejecting the Keystone petition on his own authority; Reifeis writes that this version lacks documentation. Eleanor Carson, whose husband Russell was Joseph Carson's nephew and died in 2005 at ninety-seven, told The Ledger the family had told the story for years knowing it was not carved in stone.

The State Library of Florida holds a Frost Proof Brand citrus label, printed for Ben Hill Griffin, Inc. of Frostproof sometime between 1930 and 1950.