Soldier City: How Union Veterans Founded St. Cloud in 1909
Thirty-five thousand acres, a lottery in Atlantic City and a town built by Civil War veterans in their seventies: the G.A.R. Hall, the Heritage Museum and Mount Peace tell the strangest founding story in greater Orlando.
3 minute read
No other city in greater Orlando was founded the way St. Cloud was. In 1909, the Seminole Land and Investment Company — organized with the Grand Army of the Republic, the great Union veterans’ fraternity — bought 35,000 acres on the south shore of East Lake Tohopekaliga and laid out a retirement colony for Civil War veterans: the “Soldier City.” Building lots were distributed by lottery in Atlantic City that August; the veterans who came were in their sixties, seventies and eighties, four decades past Appomattox, building a town from empty Florida scrub. By October 1910 there were some 360 homes, more than a hundred tents and roughly 2,000 residents. The grid they drew still organizes the city — and the north-south avenues still carry the names of states, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, a map of the Union written into the street signs.
The colony ran on veteran pensions — some $8,000 a year flowing into town by late 1910, by the Woman’s Club’s history — and on veteran ritual. The old soldiers were famously patriotic: Taps was blown in the evening to put the town to bed and Reveille in the morning to raise it, a camp routine imposed on a civilian town, and one the town apparently loved them for. The promotion had been run through the National Tribune, the veterans’ newspaper in Washington, whose corporation organized the land company; the pitch reached old soldiers in every Northern state, which is why the colony’s avenues filled with men who had once marched against the South now choosing to retire in it.
The G.A.R. Memorial Hall
The colony’s monument stands at 1101 Massachusetts Ave. The first officials of the newly incorporated city were elected in the post’s original hall in 1911; in 1914 the L.L. Mitchell Post #34 — named for Lucius L. Mitchell, the first Union veteran to die in St. Cloud — built the present G.A.R. Memorial Hall, a 150-by-50-foot building whose entrance is flanked by panels of inscribed brick bearing soldiers’ names and their regiments. At its height, the state historical marker outside notes, St. Cloud’s post was the largest in Florida and the second largest in the country. Florida’s G.A.R. held its last encampment here in 1940; the last Union veteran in St. Cloud died in 1943. The hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997 and is often described as the oldest remaining building in the city — the veterans’ town hall, in every sense.
The Heritage Museum and Mount Peace
Two blocks of Massachusetts Avenue hold the whole story. At 1012 Massachusetts Ave, the St. Cloud Heritage Museum — established and operated by the Woman’s Club of St. Cloud since 2005 — fills the old Veterans Memorial Library building, itself founded in 1923 by the club’s predecessors and now National Register-listed, with photographs, records and artifacts of the colony and the town that grew from it. And at Mount Peace Cemetery, established by the veterans in 1910, more than 400 of them rest — the colony’s founders in the ground they chose, in the South they once fought, under a Florida sky. It is one of the most quietly moving historic sites in the region, and almost nobody outside Osceola County knows it exists.
Reading the town today
Once you know the founding story, modern St. Cloud reads differently. The state-named avenues, the brick downtown that the veterans’ town grew into (now a National Register historic district in its own right, listed in 2023), the memorial culture that still runs through the city’s calendar — all of it descends from 1909. St. Cloud Main Street runs historic walking tours from its Pennsylvania Avenue base that stitch the markers and murals together. Pair this history with our guide to the historic downtown for the walking version, and find the hall and museum pinned on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Orlando has older buildings; it does not have another town founded, wholesale, by the men who won the Civil War.
Photo: The G.A.R. Memorial Hall, 1101 Massachusetts Avenue, St. Cloud. Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
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