Lakeside Inn: Florida’s Oldest Hotel Is Still Mount Dora’s Front Porch
Opened in 1883 as the Alexander House, the Lakeside Inn has hosted a president, survived demolition talk and kept its rocking chairs facing Lake Dora. A profile of the 143-year-old inn.
3 minute read
There are older buildings in Florida, but there is no older hotel still doing the job. The Lakeside Inn, at 100 N Alexander St on the Lake Dora waterfront, opened in 1883 as the Alexander House — a ten-room Victorian hotel with a verandah facing the lake — and it has operated ever since, which makes it Florida’s oldest continuously operating hotel and the last of the grand Victorian-era hotels remaining in Central Florida. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
From Alexander House to Lakeside Inn
The inn’s first guests were pioneers of Florida tourism: the journey from New York took about a week. The property changed names as it grew — the Lake House in the 1890s, then Lakeside Inn from 1903 — and changed shape, too. Today the hotel comprises five bright yellow-and-white heritage buildings holding 90 guest rooms and suites, gathered around the 1883 main inn. Its most famous guests arrived in the winter of 1930, when former President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge settled in for a month — a stay the inn still points to with pride, and one that helped fix Mount Dora’s reputation as a winter retreat.
The verandah is the point
Ask anyone who has stayed what they remember and they will describe the same scene: the 200-foot verandah lined with white rocking chairs, looking over the lawn to Lake Dora. The inn keeps a lakefront pool and dock, a grand lobby, the GateHouse Gift Gallery, and two places to eat and drink — the Beauclaire dining room and Tremain’s Tavern — which makes it as useful to day visitors as to guests. It is also the natural starting point for the waterfront: Premier Boat Tours runs its narrated Dora Canal cruises from the inn’s dock, and the walk to Gilbert Park, Grantham Point and the lighthouse begins at its lawn. Our on-the-water guide and lighthouse guide both start here.
Film sets, ghost tours and a second life
The inn’s résumé includes a Hollywood credit: it served as a film set for John Schlesinger’s 1981 movie Honky Tonk Freeway, a footnote the hotel itself still tells. Local lore gives it a haunted reputation, too — Mount Dora’s ghost tours make it a regular stop, trading on stories attached to its long guest list. What saved the building was less colorful and more important: after a period when demolition was a genuine possibility in the 1980s, the inn found preservation-minded owners, and the current owners, who bought it in 2010, have spent the years since restoring it project by project — a rejuvenation the local paper was still celebrating fifteen years on. The result is a working hotel that wears its age honestly rather than a landmark embalmed behind glass.
More than a place to sleep
Because it sits between downtown and the dock, the inn functions as Mount Dora’s unofficial visitor center. Weddings and events fill its lawns and dining rooms through the year; day visitors drift in for the gift gallery, a drink at Tremain’s Tavern or lunch at the Beauclaire without ever booking a room; and the boat tours, the waterfront walk and the festival streets all radiate from its corner of Alexander Street. If you only have an hour in town, the verandah is a defensible way to spend it.
Staying there now
The inn today is run as a historic hotel rather than a museum piece — restored under its current owners since 2010, with modern comforts fitted into Victorian bones. Rooms spread across the main inn and the later buildings, so ask about the building when you book if the 1883 original matters to you. Staying here puts downtown’s restaurants — the tables in our Mount Dora dining guide — within a short walk, and the town’s festival streets closer still. For the full picture of the town it anchors, start with our Mount Dora guide.
Photo: Whoisjohngalt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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