Winter Park Hall of Fame honors city's notable residents

Tucked inside the halls of the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, one small room with three white walls and a floor of shining, gray marble contains over 130 years of the town’s history. Fifteen photos of faces and familiar places are pinned against the plaster, living on in vibrant restoration. Winter Park’s residents might know some of the names on the plaques from the city’s street signs, but the Winter Park Hall of Fame is giving the town’s history a new life.

“Winter Park is not like it is by accident,” Winter Park Magazine Publisher Randy Noles said. “It was carefully planned to be a certain way and what it is today is the culmination of a vision that dates back over 130 years.”

The Winter Park Hall of Fame was brought to life by Noles and Winter Park Magazine first as a story idea. Noles and the magazine handpicked the 15 inductees for the Winter Park Hall of Fame Class of 2015. The class includes some of the town’s founding leaders and also spotlights individuals who were once unheralded, but deserve the recognition for making Winter Park what it is today.

From the more well-known Charles Morse, who developed Winter Park in his image, to the lesser-known Gus Henderson, an African-American printer and newspaper publisher, the Hall of Fame’s primary purpose is to showcase the people who made a difference in Winter Park’s community. With restored images and additional information about the inductees at the free exhibit, residents can go to the Chamber of Commerce and come face-to-face with its founding fathers and mothers.

Chip Weston, an artist who first came to Winter Park over 50 years ago as a physics student at Rollins College, helped bring it all to life, artistically.

Weston personally stylized historical photographs of the inductees based on hours of research to turn ancient and worn black-and-white pictures into colorful and modern art. On the wall an intensely blue-eyed Edwin Osgood Grover, a 2015 inductee and Mead Botanical Garden pioneer, stares back at visitors, as Hugh and Jeannette McKean, known as Winter Park’s first power couple, dance a few feet away.

“I was fortunate to know quite a few people who were part of the early community of the city,” Weston said. “So it was natural for me to want to participate in the Hall of Fame and to support Randy Noles’ efforts to foster a deeper history of our village.”

Susan Skolfield, executive director of the Winter Park History Museum, said she was happy to see those founders put on display.

“It makes our founders more vivid and present and creates more of a connection,” Skolfield said. “You’re able to look in their eyes and his (Weston’s) restorations really modernize them. He’s incredibly talented. His work just brings them alive and it’s a gift for all of us.”

Noles said that the Hall of Fame provides a service to the community by informing citizens of their ancestors who made Winter Park the way it is today. At the reception for the exhibit on Jan. 11, many notable individuals in Winter Park made their way to the Chamber of Commerce and learned a thing or two about the town’s past.

“They knew these names because they drive down the street, but they had no idea what these names actually were,” Noles said.

The exhibit is open to the public until Feb. 11 at the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce at 151 W. Lyman Ave. Skolfield is working with Noles to find a permanent location for the Hall of Fame so residents can enjoy it year after year, with new inductees and relics from the city of culture and heritage’s vast history.