Old Davenport: A 1927 City Hall, a Volunteer Museum and a Blueberry Winery
The National Register historic district, the Historical Society's museum in the Peter Rust Civic Center, and Polk County's only winery — the old town, walked properly.
3 minute read
Fifteen minutes south of the villa corridor, behind no gate and charging no admission, sits the Davenport that existed for a century before the first pool home: a 32-acre historic district, a 1927 City Hall, a museum run by volunteers, and a winery growing blueberries where citrus used to rule. If you stay in Davenport for a week and never come down here, you have visited an address, not a place. This is the old town, walked properly.
The historic district
The Davenport Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 15, 1997, holds 28 historic buildings and one structure in the blocks bounded by Suwannee and Orange Avenues, Palmetto Street and West Boulevard. The anchor is the old City Hall of 1927 — arched loggias, a bell tower, and CITY HALL 1927 spelled out over the door — with the Menninger Building and the Miller Building among the early-20th-century commercial survivors around Bay Street. It is a small district and an honest one: a railroad-and-citrus town’s downtown, kept. Park by City Hall or along Bay Street and walk it in half an hour; Market Square, at 110 West Bay Street, gives you the pavilion, the picnic tables and the Historical Society’s Little Free Library as your rest stop.
The museum in the Peter Rust Civic Center
The Davenport Historical Society — the volunteers who assembled the historic-district designation in the 1990s — keeps its museum at the Peter Rust Civic Center, 5 South Allapaha Avenue, a building raised in 1935 in the depths of the Depression. Inside are the artifacts of the town the district outside only hints at: railroad depot material, citrus-industry exhibits, an art gallery of local work, and an exhibit honoring the city’s Medal of Honor recipient. The society’s Front Porch Memories program records residents’ stories as a video time capsule, and its rooms double as the town’s book-club-and-painting-class living room. Hours are limited and volunteer-run — check the society’s site before you go — but this is the single best hour a Davenport visitor can spend understanding where they are staying.
True Blue Winery: the citrus town’s second act
End the walk at 604 Pink Apartment Road, where Howard and Fatima Gill turned a hobby farm begun in 2008 into True Blue Winery — opened in 2012 as Polk County’s first winery, and still its only one. The signature pours are blueberry wines in sweet, semi-sweet and semi-dry styles, made from fruit grown on the farm’s own acres, alongside other fruit wines and a bistro menu; in season — roughly mid-March to the first of May — the farm opens for u-pick blueberries. It is a working farm winery with limited weekly hours, so check before driving down, and treat it as what it is: the agricultural town adapting, in public, one blueberry bush at a time.
The old town’s working present tense is worth a stop too: the Tom Fellows Community Center at 207 North Boulevard West runs the fitness rooms, gymnasiums and programs of a city that still functions for its residents first — a useful corrective to the idea that Davenport is only a rental market with a flag on it.
Putting the afternoon together
The old-town circuit runs about three hours without hurrying: the district walk, the museum, Wilson Park’s splash pad and its Golden Holly citrus-label sign, the quarter-mile loop at Lake Play, and a glass at True Blue — the parks half of the day is mapped in our parks and lakes roundup, and the corridor context is in our two-Davenports guide. Come back up US-17/92 and US-27 to the villa by evening. The corridor will still be there, brightly lit and open late. The old town is why it has a name. Find every stop on our Orlando Top Spots Map.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank
