Lake Lily Park: A Victorian House, a Fountain and Maitland’s Front Porch
An 1884 carpenter's house on the National Register, a half-mile loop with ibis and turtles, a Sunday market nearby and the city's 1965 venue on the south shore: Lake Lily carries Maitland's whole story.
3 minute read
Every town has a front porch. Maitland‘s is a small, almost perfectly round lake with a fountain at its center, a boardwalk along one shore, and an 1884 Victorian house keeping watch from the lawn. Lake Lily Park, at 701 Lake Lily Drive, is barely two acres by some counts and carries an outsized share of the city’s life: morning dog walks, wedding photographs, birthday parties under the shelters, trains rolling past the eastern edge, and — on the park’s south side — the mid-century venue where Maitland has celebrated since 1965.
The loop and its residents
A paved path of roughly half a mile circles the lake, part of it an elevated boardwalk shaded by cypress and oak. The loop is easy and step-free, the kind of walk that becomes a daily habit before you notice it has. The resident wildlife treats the park as its own property: turtles sun along the banks, ducks work the shallows, and white ibis commute across the lawn in loose, unbothered flocks — the flock in our photograph is a fair portrait of an ordinary afternoon. Benches face the fountain, a playground absorbs the younger visitors’ energy, and picnic shelters and a gazebo host the weekend party circuit. Come at golden hour and the whole scene — fountain, boardwalk, house on the rise — composes itself.
The carpenter’s house on the shore
On the park’s edge stands the Waterhouse Residence Museum, at 820 South Lake Lily Drive. William H. Waterhouse, an English settler and carpenter, bought the lot south of the lake and built the two-and-a-half-story frame house in 1884 for his wife Sarah and their children, Charles and Stella. Waterhouse was no hobbyist: he built homes for some of Maitland’s most affluent early families, helped the young community win its first charter in 1885, and kept his own house in the family for generations. Restored to reflect a middle-class Victorian family’s life — heart-pine turned by hand for its Eastlake staircase — the house is one of only a few surviving examples of nineteenth-century vernacular architecture in Maitland, and one of roughly a dozen surviving homes from the settlement period. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 2, 1983.
Next door, the Carpentry Shop Museum — the shop itself dates to 1883, a year older than the house — displays the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century woodworking tools of Waterhouse’s trade. The house is a docent-led visit rather than a wander, which suits it: the story of a working builder’s family explains Maitland’s founding generation better than any mansion could. Both museums belong to the Art & History Museums of Maitland, so pair them with the Maitland Art Center across town for the full arc from 1884 to the Mayan Revival 1930s.
Markets, festivals and the venue on the lake
The park is also Maitland’s gathering ground, though its most famous weekly ritual now stages a short stroll away. The Maitland Farmers’ Market — for years a Lake Lily Sunday fixture — moved in November 2021 to Independence Lane beside City Hall, where dozens of vendors now spread along the lane and through Independence Square with produce, flowers, crafts and food, live acoustic music courtesy of Performing Arts Matters, and the restaurants of Maitland City Centre steps away. Each fall, the Maitland Rotary Art Festival returns to the lake itself, turning the shore into one of Florida’s most distinctive juried art shows. And on the south shore sits the Venue on Lake Lily — the historic Maitland Civic Center at 641 Maitland Avenue South, founded in 1965 as a community-funded nonprofit, ranked No. 6 in our Best Wedding Venues in Orlando with a Net Score of 91.2 (category winner feature: Four Seasons weddings). Its East Wing seats 175 for banquets; the West Wing with its stage holds 220 seated or 400 standing; and every rental dollar supports the building’s upkeep rather than a landlord.
The practical loop
Do what Maitland does: park once, walk the loop slowly, tour the Waterhouse house if the docents are in, then cross Orlando Avenue for provisions — Antonio’s market, in our eating guide, is the local picnic supply run. Find the park on the Orlando Top Spots Map. One slow circuit, no agenda: that is the correct unit of Lake Lily.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, 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