Two Davenports: The Railroad Town and the Villa Corridor
A 1915 citrus city on US-17/92 and a mile-after-mile villa corridor on US-27 share one name. How the two Davenports grew, and how to do each one well.
3 minute read
There are two Davenports, and most visitors only ever meet one of them. The first is a small Polk County city on US-17/92: a railroad-and-citrus town incorporated on March 11, 1915, with a 1927 City Hall, a water tower, a splash pad and a blueberry winery down a lane called Pink Apartment Road. The second is the Davenport of the address lines — the US-27 corridor north and south of Interstate 4, where mile after mile of vacation-home subdivisions hold the pool villas that much of the Disney-going world sleeps in. Understanding Davenport means holding both in your head at once.
The town that the railroad built
The older story starts with Fort Davenport, established in 1838 during the Second Seminole War about twelve miles northwest of the present city and named for Colonel William Davenport. The modern town began in the 1880s, when the South Florida Railroad arrived at a settlement called Horse Creek, after the creek recorded on an 1849 Army survey. A post office opened at Horse Creek in 1884; in 1886 the name changed to Davenport. After fire devastated the early settlement around the turn of the century, the town rebuilt roughly a mile south, and in 1915 it incorporated. Through the 1920s this was a citrus town with hotels, groves and a golf course — the economy that the Davenport Historical Society still documents in its museum at the Peter Rust Civic Center on South Allapaha Avenue.
The corridor that Disney built — indirectly
Drive west to US-27 and the centuries swap. The corridor exists because of a simple piece of geometry: I-4’s Exit 55 puts Walt Disney World within an easy drive, while Polk County land stayed cheap enough to build whole subdivisions of privately owned pool homes. Communities like Highlands Reserve — villas wrapped around a golf course — turned Davenport into one of the largest vacation-rental bases in the Orlando market. Nobody here is staying in a resort, and that is precisely the appeal: a full house, a private pool and a kitchen, at the price of doing your own grocery run.
How the corridor organizes itself
The corridor has three working hubs. At the north end, Posner Park at the I-4 junction is the big-box living room — Target, Best Buy, JCPenney, Dick’s Sporting Goods and a nine-screen Cinépolis with an IMAX auditorium. Mid-corridor, Berry Town Center at Sand Mine Road is the grocery anchor, built around a Publix with a ring of small restaurants and services. And the golf communities — Highlands Reserve, Providence, Ridgewood Lakes — supply the corridor’s green space and a good share of its rental streets. Our arrival playbook turns that geography into a first-day routine.
What locals know that guests miss
Residents will tell you the corridor’s real amenity is Northeast Regional Park, an 83-acre county park on US-27 with turf sports fields, courts, a dog park and a boat ramp on Lake Davenport — the weekend infrastructure of the people who live here year-round. They will also tell you to go south at least once: old Davenport is a fifteen-minute drive and a different century, best taken in through our old-town walk past the historic district to True Blue Winery. And they treat the neighboring portals honestly: ChampionsGate and Reunion, just northeast, are their own scenes — see our ChampionsGate and Reunion hubs — while Kissimmee and US-192 handle the overflow dining the corridor cannot.
How to do Davenport well
Stay in the corridor for what it is good at — space, pools, golf and value — and plan your eating with our Davenport dining guide rather than defaulting to the interstate exits. Give the parks a morning (our parks and lakes roundup covers the options, including Lake Louisa State Park up US-27 in Clermont), give the old town an afternoon, and let the villa pool do the rest. Davenport rewards the unhurried: it is a base camp, not a backdrop, and the travelers who treat it that way tend to book it again. Everything named here is pinned on our Orlando Top Spots Map.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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