- December 5, 2025
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This postcard, mailed from Florida to Rhode Island in January 1907, hints at the challenges many growers faced in an otherwise semi-tropical region. On the front, the sender has written “the trees do not look like this since the freeze. Love from R.J.L.”
This mobile “chamber of commerce” helped attract more growers to the area with a depiction of year-round crops such as lettuce and oranges.
The intersection of Bluford Avenue and McKey Street, looking west from Bluford. The road today is occupied by small businesses.
The citrus industry was “huge” in Florida, and Winter Garden was well on its way to becoming the citrus shipping capital of the world when Earl Jones mailed this postcard to “Fred and Minnie” in 1922.
Many early postcards featured formal photographs of family members. J.L. Dillard, a Winter Garden pioneer, “carries” himself in a wheelbarrow in this break from formality.
Deer Island was originally an island owned and cultivated by various people. The Irrgangs purchased the land in 1933; they lived there and grew citrus. After the 1983-84 freeze wiped out much of the agriculture, the land was divided into lakefront lots.
A 1950s view of the Municipal Pool, later renamed Farnsworth Pool.
Postcards have always been an inexpensive way to share and collect memories of vacations to other parts of the state, country or world.
The Winter Garden Heritage Foundation has amassed a collection of postcards from West Orange County and from local residents who mailed notes to loved ones back home. Some of these cards, 38 in all, are on display in a new exhibit, “Wish You Were Here: Historic Postcards of West Orange County,” at the History Research and Education Center, 21 E. Plant St.
Others have been collected through the years and donated to the history center.
When postcards were first distributed, only the post office was allowed to print them; but Congress changed that rule in 1898. This meant a mass production of postcards featuring anything from churches and schools, downtown buildings and downtowns before the buildings were even there to flora and fauna and formal military photographs.
Local postcards touted the citrus trade with orange trees, orange blossoms, crates and groves. Still others advertised picturesque towns inviting folks to move to West Orange County.
In the WGHF exhibit, a postcard announcing greetings from Florida on a crate of oranges was sent from Arlie Jones, of Winter Garden, to her sister, Mrs. F.B. Bailey, of Hartwell, Georgia, with this note:
“Dear Sis, I will just write you a card today. I received your letter a few days ago, was glad to hear from you. How are you all getting about by now? This leaves us all very well except Dad he is sick I think he has the Lagrippe, We haven’t got the Butter yet. I’m going up town this morning to see if it’s there. So I will close I will write you a letter next week so ans. soon. From your sister as B4, Arlie Jones.”
La grippe is an old-fashioned term for the flu, and Winter Garden residents referred to downtown Plant Street as “uptown.”
These small treasures capture not only scenes of yesteryear, but also the common lingo.
The exhibit will remain on display at the history center until Dec. 4.
Contact Amy Quesinberry Rhode at [email protected].
