Communication Builds Our Community

100 Years Ago: The Highlander of January 9, 1924

Series: This Week in History | Story 21

A housing boom in Lake Wales is not an unprecedented thing, as 100 years ago the young city was experiencing the same thing as 78 new homes were built in 1923, without filling the demand.

During the early 1920s Florida was in the midst of the Great Florida Land Boom, a speculative bubble that eventually collapsed but left Lake Wales and a hundred other towns with an enormous inventory of new buildings, including the unique collection of masonry structures that dominate the downtown area of Lake Wales. Structures like the two arcades, the 1919 Bullard Building, the Friedlander Building, and the Caldwell Temple Building, along with the railroad depot (now the History Museum) and the nearby, ornate South Scenic Building are reminders of that era.

 

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