The Citrus Tower Still Keeps Watch Over a Clermont That Changed Around It
Opened July 14, 1956 to overlook 17 million citrus trees, the 226-foot Citrus Tower outlived the groves, the freezes and the road-trip era. Why the deck still earns the stop — and what the view tells you now.
3 minute read
There is a moment, driving north on US-27 into Clermont, when the Florida Citrus Tower resolves out of the haze — a 226-foot exclamation of white concrete with an orange stripe — and the whole twentieth century of this town comes back into focus. The tower opened on July 14, 1956, at 141 N. Highway 27, and it remains what it was built to be: the best seat in Lake County. This is its story, and why it still earns the stop. For the rest of the town, see our Clermont hub.
Built to sell a view of orange trees
The tower was the idea of developers A.W. Thacker and Jack Toole, who formed the Florida Towers Corporation and funded construction through a public sale of stock. Work began in 1955 on one of the highest hills of Florida’s central ridge, and the finished structure used some five million pounds of concrete and 149,000 pounds of reinforced steel to reach 226 feet — about 22 stories — with the antenna tip standing 500 feet above sea level. The glass-enclosed observation deck was the product: from it, visitors could see across parts of eight counties and, in the early years, over a citrus industry that filled the hills as far as the eye could travel. In its first decade the tower drew up to half a million visitors a year, riding the US-27 road-trip corridor between Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs.
What happened to the view
The honest answer is: Florida happened. The extension of Florida’s Turnpike in the 1960s pulled traffic off US-27. Then came the freezes — 1983, 1985 and 1989 — which killed most of Lake County’s citrus groves outright. The tower’s view changed from a working agricultural empire to a growing city, and visitation thinned. The building survived a series of owners and paint schemes, including a white-and-turquoise era, before being repainted in its original orange and white in 2015. The Homan family sold it in 2022, and after renovation it reopened in May 2023 — still selling rides to the top, nearly seven decades on.
What you get today
The elevator ride is short; the deck is the point. On a clear day the sightlines run to Lake Minneola and Lake Minnehaha below and across the ridge country that makes Clermont the least flat place in peninsular Florida — the geography we unpack in our Clermont hill-country guide. Downstairs, the lobby holds a small museum of the tower’s own history — vintage photographs, construction-era models, discontinued souvenirs — and the ROOM: Valencia event space, gift shop and coffee service that has operated in the lobby in recent years. Historic photos upstairs and down let you compare the grove-covered hills of 1956 with the rooftops of today, which is the tower’s real exhibit: not nostalgia, but change you can measure in tree lines.
How to fold it into a Clermont day
Do the tower first, while the morning light is on the lakes and before the afternoon haze flattens the distance. Then descend into downtown for lunch — The Crooked Spoon gastropub sits nearby on Citrus Tower Boulevard, and our Clermont dining rundown covers it and the Montrose Street blocks. Finish at the Lake Minneola waterfront, where the view from the tower becomes the ground you walk on. One practical note: the tower is a 1956 building and carries its age with its charm; treat the deck visit as a history stop with a panorama attached, not a thrill ride, and it will not disappoint. Clermont has no shortage of newer attractions competing for the day — but only one of them was here when the groves were.
Photo: Freeholdman12, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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