The Brick Road That Built Conway
Fort Gatlin, a British citrus colony and a brick highway in 1914 — Conway's layers run from the Seminole War to the ranch-house lake suburb of today.
3 minute read
Before Conway was a neighborhood, it was a destination — and before it was a destination, it was a fort’s hinterland. The community south of downtown Orlando that now runs on lake mornings and diner breakfasts has one of the longest continuous histories of any place in the city, and most of it is still legible in the streets. This is the short version, best read before a drive down Conway Road.
Fort Gatlin and the first settlement
The story opens just north of today’s Conway, where in November 1838, during the Second Seminole War, the U.S. Army built Fort Gatlin — named for Assistant Surgeon John S. Gatlin, killed in the Dade Massacre of 1835 — on high ground overlooking the lakes. The Army withdrew in 1849, but soldiers and families stayed, raising cattle and planting citrus around the post. A post office named Jernigan opened near the fort in 1850. That cluster of settlement, in what is now the Conway–Lake Margaret country, is where Orlando begins.
Conway itself was settled in the 1850s, in the same wave — farmsteads around the chain of lakes, tied to the little county seat a few miles north. It was a place before Orlando was much of one.
The British colony and the citrus years
In the 1880s, Conway was replanted with a distinctive accent: a colony of British settlers — citrus growers and sportsmen drawn by the groves, the fishing and the clear lakes — took up land around Lake Conway. The sporting part was not incidental. The chain’s clear water and bass made Conway an early destination for the rod-and-reel visitor, a full lifetime before Orlando learned to spell tourism. Citrus paid the bills; the lakes provided the pleasure; and Conway settled into the prosperous, slightly eccentric groove of a grove community with a British streak.
1914: the brick road
The event that fixed modern Conway was a road. In 1914, the brick Conway Road was built — running along what is now Briercliff Drive, Curry Ford Road and Conway Road — and it was one of the first paved highways in Orange County. Brick was the high technology of Florida road-building in 1914, and a paved route from Orlando’s edge to the Conway groves changed the community’s economics overnight: citrus could move in weather that stopped wagons, and Orlando people could reach the lakes for a day’s fishing without an expedition.
The road gave the community its enduring name and its spine. Today’s Conway Road is State Road 15, widened and asphalted, but it walks the brick road’s line — the corridor of diners, markets and storefronts in Where to Eat in Conway is the brick road’s direct descendant.
The suburb that grew slowly
What the brick road started, the postwar decades finished — gently. Conway’s housing stock is the evidence: the median home dates to the mid-1970s, roughly three-quarters of it built between 1950 and 1989, overwhelmingly single-family detached houses on real lots, many on canals cut to the chain. There was no master developer and no boom-year subdivision wave; Conway accreted, street by street, into the ranch-house lake community it remains. Barber Park arrived in 1997 as the suburb’s front yard; the community market followed as its town square.
Read the layers in order — fort country, British citrus colony, brick-road grove town, ranch-house lake suburb — and modern Conway stops looking like sprawl and starts looking like what it is: one of Orlando’s oldest communities, still organized around the same lakes that drew settlers in the 1850s.
Start exploring at the Conway hub and our Conway guide; the region’s ranked places are on the Top Spots Map.
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