The Chetwynd Chronicles

Jill Sherman, a senior writer for The Villages Daily Sun, thought her article about Chetwynd would publish last Tuesday. So imagine my surprise when the first email I saw early the morning before was headed “WOW!” Jo’s message sent me flying out the door in my jammies to fetch my paper and to verify the “grandness” of the article of which she wrote. Jill’s skillful writing, along with nine pictures, not only summarizes my work and story but is far beyond my wildest expectations in terms of length—just short of two full pages. One reader said that he was prepared for a paragraph or two on the continued page rather than two-thirds of a page. Anyway, I loved the emails and phone messages and phone messages left while I was—you guessed it—playing golf. Jill said the article was the “talk of the office.” It was also the talk of The Villages radio station although I didn’t hear it. As for television coverage?

The afternoon of the photo shoot at Holy Trinity Church I was told that the photographers (note plural) were back in the school parking lot. Sure enough there was George who I had once encountered when the church was vandalized along with John who was removing a TV camera from the back of a SUV. John was mystified about his “work order”—something about a colony called Chetwynd that he thought was up north somewhere. “Let me see the cover,” he kind of barked. I held it out. “Oh my God; you mean it was right here? In Lake County?” Now whether his interview with me ever ran, I haven’t a clue. But I’ll never forget John’s reaction.

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One of my research dilemmas about Chetwynd was the location of the Chetwynd Arms Hotel in the town of Chetwynd on Lake Ella. As you will note below, Lake Ella is not a very large lake.

This particular photo was taken from a vacant lot on the northeast side of the lake. Just as it might have been over 125 years ago, homes dot the east half of the shoreline; the rest is as it appears above. So where might the hotel have been located?

All of the owners of the lots on the east side purchased in 1885-1886, the only sales recorded, have been identified. Those owners include Granville Chetwynd-Stapylton’s bank partner, William H. Morrison, who owned a large and expensive home that burned in 1892.

Meanwhile a colony descendent, Alfred P. Bosanquet, in an undated copy of a presentation to the Lake County Historical Society several decades ago, said, “Mr. Morrison built a beautiful home and the Chetwynd Arms Hotel on the west bank of Lake Ella. Nearly all of the land on the west side was owned by the Chetwynd Land Company whose officers were Morrison and Dr. Samuel B. Smallwood. Smallwood owned a 26-acre lot somewhat northwest of Lake Ella.

Adding to my bewilderment is a Chetwynd Arms advertisement for the 1888 season that claims,“A charming lake, spring fed, lies immediately in the rear of the house. . . and has a nice frontage of more than an hundred feet.” (The ad never mentioned “hotel.”)

Now, having said all this, the Southern Railway’s Chetwynd passenger depot was due east of the town. Although there was a 30 feet wide road around the lake, it makes no sense to have brought guests around the west side of the lake to a back door entrance of the “house.” And so, as the song goes, “I’m right back to where I started from!” Where was the Chetwynd Arms?

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Sheri Hudson, a recent newcomer to this area as well as a history aficionado, and I took a tour today of the Colony of Chetwynd. Although impeded somewhat by the construction on US Route 441 we covered the territory including a drive to one place I had never explored—the location of the Montclair Race Track, one of three race tracks where the colonists gathered for Sunday afternoon races. While the picture below doesn’t “show” the precise location of the track it was certainly close by: “bounded by Flatwoods Road on the west and Youngs Road on the south,” according to a later deed.

Driving south on Flatwoods from W. Main Street, Leesburg, the scenery turns quite lush and pastoral. Once at the intersection, Youngs Road ends to the west and Flatwoods to the south. From there back to Stapylton and Company on Zephyr Lake via today’s roads is almost six miles.

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What began with a “cold” telephone call to plea for a family picture, progressed to an exchange of a couple of dozen emails, and then with a three-plus day visit from Louis (Bud) Percival Bosanquet and his wife, Janine, of Ballwin, Missouri. Ballwin is a suburb of St. Louis where Bud retired as a chemical engineer at Monsanto. He just happens to be the grandson of a Chetwynd colonist and horticulturalist, Louis Percival Bosanquet and his wife, Ellen Lewis Hall, a lineal descendent of George Washington.

Louis (Bud) Bosanquet

Bud, now 82, was born and raised in the eleven-room home that his great-uncle, Augustus Percival, built near the northeast side of Zephyr Lake in the early 1880s, or about the same time Granville Chetwynd-Stapylton constructed his three-building complex on the south side of the lake. When Augustus accepted the position of executive secretary of the British Royal Club in Lisbon, Portugal, he sold his property to Louis, who had arrived in 1888. While most of the colonists fled the area after the Great Freeze of 1894-95 that devastated the citrus industry, Louis and his family stayed. But instead of farming common produce, he began to cultivate trees and bushes on his land that included a formal English garden and an expanse of antique roses, perhaps an acre of some 75 varieties. Eventually the estate contained about 1000 varieties of trees and plants including 14 varieties of bamboo, about the same number of palms, about 100 hibiscuses from Hawaii along with experimental plants shipped from the US Department of Agriculture.

Louis also developed hybrid crinums including the best known and possibly the most popular, Crinum x Ellen Bosanquet, a beautiful magenta lily named for his wife which was introduced commercially in 1930.

Another crinum, a small pale-pink or pale-lavender plant, was named for Louis, although Bud claims it was really intended to be named for grandfather’s daughter, Frances.

Before their visit, Bud had sent me four spiral-bound books written by his great-uncle, Clarence Williams. Clarence had married Ellen Hall Bosanquet’s sister, Gertrude Hall. In those volumes he called what we call Fair Oaks the Bosanquet Place. Of course I asked Bud about that. He snickered and said that his mother, Ruth Ward, provided the name because of the grand oaks along the road south of the home.

Richard, Bud’s nephew and the last Bosanquet to live in the home, sold it in 2002. Although the new owners intended to operate a bed and breakfast, the required renovations apparently overwhelmed them; they walked away but locked the north gate behind them.

Over the few days of their visit Bud showed me many places of local interest and answered all of my questions and then some, to the point of mind saturation. But we saved the best for last—a squeeze through a gap near the locked gate and a tramp down Fair Oaks Drive (a rutted sandy lane) to his family home. Along the way, stepping over fallen trees and through the brush laden with sticker burrs, Bud recalled the locations of various tree stands, gardens, the bull pen, and the site of his father, Alfred’s, greenhouse. Like his father, Alfred carried on his father’s vocation including the establishment of Bosanquet Florist in Leesburg that is no longer owned by the family. Here and there very tall and healthy palm trees rose among otherwise scrubby and scruffy trees. As we poked around the flora around the home we found a couple gardenia bushes tucked away as well as mature azalea bushes such as the one pictured behind Bud above.

Walking along the front porch Bud noted the windows imported from England and added that no one wanted to wash them. Here’s why:

Most of the first floor windows were boarded up; the front door only partially; partially enough to trespass into the foyer with a large white staircase and hall leading not only to the back door but to the semi-remodeled kitchen where, of all things, four small 1916 Episcopal Church hymnals, words only, lay on one of the original counters. Inside was stamped “Holy Trinity Church, Fruitland Park, Florida.” I accused Bud and his siblings of theft and took two of them—one to return to the church and the other for me.

After roaming through the house as Bud related stories too numerous to cover here, we walked away from Bud’s home of nearly 60 years ago and back down the trail to the north gate.

This is but one piece of the ground we covered the past few days. The rest of the story comes later. Bud brought two more volumes of family history with him including an extensive English produced pedigree chart that includes his grandparents followed by “Florida Branch” and nothing more. . .

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Lake Reflections

Orlando Sentinel, August 24, 1994

By Ormund Powers

Jim Warnke, an expert on vanished communities, says there are 350 ghost towns in Florida, of which he has located 20 in Lake County.

Checking old maps and old histories, I came up with 32, some of which were not on Warnke’s list. He had 16 I didn’t have. If you add those, you have 48 lost villages and towns in Lake County. Seems like a lot. Of course, our figures may be wrong.

Jim Warnke, who lives in Boynton Beach, has been trudging the back roads of Florida, backpack and all, for many years. He has written a small book on the subject that is available from him for $6. (P.O. Box 1408, Boynton Beach 33425)

”They came to the promised land of Florida in the early 1800s for many reasons,” Warnke writes, ”the consumptive for his health, the pioneer for a new home for his family, the merchant for a new start, the tycoon to enrich his holdings and the worker to lead a new life in the land of everlasting summer.”

Then Warnke asks: ”How could a whole town of homes, stores, hotels and post offices vanish so that today one is hard put to even find the spot where the settlement existed?

”The reasons are varied but are usually due to hard economics – a bad freeze, a railroad bypassing the town, or perhaps the local main industry closing its doors. Whatever the reason, Florida is dotted with over 350 of these historical and little-known ghost towns that contributed so much to the progress of the state.”

Some of the historical villages, Warnke says, may still have the proverbial hermit in residence.

”Some do have the remains of clapboard structures still standing after years of forest fires and hurricanes,” he writes. ”On other sites, one can still find the handmade bricks and the old bottles of another era to remind him that he is standing on the soil of history.”

Eleven of the ghost towns Warnke identifies are in the Ocala National Forest, and he reminds us that it is a federal offense to disturb the sites of those ghost towns: Kismet, St. Francis, Sellers Lake, Summit, Bryanville, Syracuse, Churchill, Kerr City, Barronswood, Messina and Acron.

Others in Lake County he identifies are: Conant, one mile north of Lady Lake on State Road 25; Grand Island, off State Road 44, north of Lake Eustis; Old Seneca, three miles west of Eustis on State Road 439; Lovejoys Mill, on the railroad, two miles east of Sorrento off State Road 46; Wayland, on the railroad, 3 1/2 miles east of Sorrento off S.R. 46; Cassia Station, on the railroad, seven miles east of Sorrento off S.R.46; Ethel City, east of State Road 433 on the south county line; Cason, three miles southwest of Okahumpka on the railroad off State Road 48; Winsted, near Florida’s Turnpike and State Road 25; Hawkinsville, one mile south of State Roads 42 and 44 on the St. Johns River.

My own list, based on some very early maps and information from the Lake County Historical Society, includes in addition to some of Warnke’s, Chetwynd, two miles north of Fruitland Park; Slighville, east of Lady Lake on the west side of Lake Griffin; Lake Woodward, both a lake and a town on the lake; Higley, eight miles west of Umatilla; Seneca, six miles east of Eustis; Albert, on the Palatlakaha River near Lake Susan, Ravenwood, a development alongside Pittman, north of Umatilla; Glendale, between Umatilla and Altoona; Waterin’ Pond, halfway between Leesburg and Slighville; Whitney, west of Leesburg; Emeralda, north Lake Griffin.

Villa City, south of Mascotte; Monterey, east of Lake Louisa; Exeter, south of Yalaha; Parkland, on Lake Harris; Lassiter, on Lake Griffin; Bloomfield, near Leesburg; Dundee, north of Fruitland Park; Lanier, near Lake Griffin; Mersia, near Cassia; Mason and Fort Mason, north of Eustis; Sligh, west of Lady Lake; Mount Home, between Eustis and Tavares; Eldorado, southwest of Lake Eustis; Gardenia, between Dundee and Fruitland Park; Stickler, west of Umatilla; and a few I haven’t been able to locate satisfactorily, including Ponceannah, Landis, Lower Blackwater, Helena and Bluff Pond.

Warnke notes that if he has offended any town fathers (by calling their towns ”ghosts” when they are not) he apologizes, as we all do. But on the other hand, there may be some vanished communities few of us know about, and if this is the case, we would appreciate hearing.

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Over a year ago Barbara Beaman contacted me quite out of the blue. Apparently she had visited my previous blog that listed the colonists I had discovered. Barbara knew about one of them, Villiers Chernocke Smith, because, like me, she’s a family historian. Her ancestror, Algernon Beaman, owned a home and groves on the southern shore of Crystal Lake in Fruitland Park; Smith was Beaman’s caretaker.

Barbara writes:I don’t know when Mr.Smith became the caretaker. My family took a trip to Florida in January 1886 with the intent of buying a winter hotel property. They owned prosperous summer hotels northwest of Boston that were open from May 1st until October 1st. I really don’t know why they bought this property instead. I also don’t know if they went down there every winter from the beginning, or if that was something that happened later. They definitely were winter only people – October to April, so they would have needed a caretaker from the beginning. After the big freezes of 1894/95, they needed someone knowledgeable to help restore the groves. Since their main livelihood and properties were up north, money to rebuild was not the kind of issue it was for the people who lived in Florida full time.

Barbara also sent pictures. Here’s one of the family home:

And here’s one of Villiers holding an unknown child alongside Algernon Beaman.

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This 8×11 watercolor by George Elin is available for sale from Jon Berg Fine Arts, Santa Monica, CA, for $235.  Although signed George Elin, Berg believes the artist was Felix Elin.

I am convinced that the artist was George Herbert Augustus Elin, one of the colony’s premier horsemen who is pictured several times in The Chetwynd Chronicles. Elin established one of the colony’s social clubs, the Forest Club, in 1883.  By 1893 he had returned to London where he married and raised two children.  Sometime before 1911 he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia.

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