The Land
Central Florida history — the phosphate era, the lakes, the families who built it and those who live here now.
The Towers That Broadcast Gulf to Ocean
The chief engineer who built WGTO told a reporter in August 1955 that the GTO stood for Gulf to Ocean, or else Gainesville to Okeechobee; the license left Polk County in 1989 or 1990 depending on which account you read, and a Lake Alfred road still carries the call letters
November 3, 2026
The Brick That Left Bartow
The brick for Florida's first brick schoolhouse south of Jacksonville came out of E. C. Stuart's Bartow Brick Company in 1887, and when the school came down in 1930 the brick was hauled out of Polk County to a packing house at Lake Placid
October 27, 2026
The Man Who Carried the Paper to Fort Meade
The post office application Joseph Washington Carson volunteered to carry to Fort Meade in 1892 said Lakemont; the commission that came back named Walter Overocker postmaster of Frostproof, and his daughter spent her life explaining why
October 15, 2026
To the Generation Who Open and Possess These Relics
Bartow sealed a greeting to the future inside the Summerlin Institute cornerstone on May 12, 1887, and when the stone was opened during the 1930 demolition everything inside it was gone
October 12, 2026
One Hundred Twenty-Five Blocks a Day
Frank Lloyd Wright wanted his Lakeland campus built out of its own ground, and the ground was a fertilized orange grove that would not make a block
October 2, 2026
The Cane the Children Gave Him
A girl named Maggie Johnson handed Jacob Summerlin an engraved cane at a Bartow cornerstone laying in 1887, and the cane went missing for more than a century
September 23, 2026
The Trooper Who Never Reached Cuba
Two Tenth Cavalry troopers were arrested in downtown Lakeland in May 1898 for a killing no two accounts describe the same way, and one of them never got out of Bartow
September 17, 2026
The Lie She Told at Loughman
The sawmill camp in northeast Polk County took the woman in the shiny gray Chevrolet for a detective, so Zora Neale Hurston told them she was a bootlegger the law wanted in Miami
September 15, 2026
The Night the Lake Came Over the Levee
The night before the storm came ashore, weather officials told Florida it would not hit
June 9, 2026
Four Million Acres at Twenty-Five Cents
In 1881, a Pennsylvania saw manufacturer wrote a check to the State of Florida for one million dollars and walked out owning four million acres
May 29, 2026
Spook Hill, 1950
The hill that rolls cars uphill seems to have been invented in stages, and most of the people who did the inventing never left a name.
May 3, 2026
He Learned to Swim at Nine Months Old
The canals that made Winter Haven famous were dug to haul citrus fruit, and the company that built them went bankrupt in two years
April 29, 2026
He Quit the Piggly Wiggly and Opened a Store Next Door
George Jenkins arrived in Florida at seventeen with nine dollars and built something Lakeland still lives inside. The story of Publix, told from the city that never let him leave.
April 25, 2026
The Empty Money Box
In May of 1918, H.G. Browning came to return a horse he believed belonged to Isham Stewart — and knew something was wrong before he got to the door
April 24, 2026
Bone Valley: The Ground Beneath Polk County
A history of phosphate, reclamation, and the land that became home — what the draglines found, what the mines built, and what's underneath the lakes and neighborhoods of Polk County today.
April 15, 2026