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Why It Started and What People Did There
St. Cloud was founded for a single, specific purpose: as a retirement colony for Union veterans of the Civil War. The date of founding was April 16, 1909, and the organizers were the Seminole Land & Investment Company, which had acquired 35,000 acres in Osceola County near Kissimmee and advertised the project to members of the Grand Army of the Republic — the fraternal organization of Union veterans — as the ideal place to spend their remaining years. Lots of five acres sold for fifty dollars. By the end of the first year, roughly 1,700 people were living in a community that had been palmetto scrub and pine forest twelve months before.
The veterans who came were old men — the war had ended in 1865, and this was 1909, which meant the youngest men who had served were in their sixties and most were older. They arrived to find tents and an uncompleted hotel, no graded streets, no water system, no services beyond what they could provide for each other. They grubbed the palmettos with hoes and cut the pines with crosscut saws, the same fundamental process of settlement that their parents' generation had performed on the prairies and their grandparents' generation on the Appalachian frontier, applied now to Florida subtropical scrub at an age when most men are looking for comfort rather than challenge. What they built, surprisingly quickly, was a real community: by October 1910, there were 360 homes, over a hundred tents, a waterworks, an electric plant, telephones, churches, a school, cement block plants, a post office, a 5&10 store, a Masonic hall, and — pointedly, given the temperance commitments of the GAR — no saloons.
Was It Considered Healthy? What Was It Like in the 1920s?
The location had been chosen deliberately for its health credentials. The Seminole Land & Investment Company had searched Florida for a site suited for "health, climate, and productiveness of the soil," and the elevation of the tract — on what the company called the backbone of Florida, the divide between the Kissimmee and St. Johns River watersheds — was specifically cited as a protection against the frosts that plagued lower-lying areas. Lake East Tohopekaliga, on the town's western edge, provided fishing, boating, and bathing. The dry upland character of the site was considered healthier than the low swampy ground that Floridians of the era associated with malaria and fevers.
By the 1920s, St. Cloud had grown from a tent colony into a functioning small city. The pension money that the veterans brought with them — the 1910 census recorded $8,000 a month in pension income flowing into the community — had created a stable economic foundation unusual for a new Florida town. A library was built and dedicated in February 1923. The town had the organized, purposeful character of a community that had been planned by people who understood the value of institutions: it was, after all, a colony of men who had fought for the Union and believed in the idea of civic life. The GAR's particular culture — the parades, the patriotic observances, the mutual aid networks, the strong sense of collective identity — shaped St. Cloud in ways that distinguished it from the more casual settlements growing up around it in Osceola County.
For the old men who had come south for their health, the Florida climate was genuinely therapeutic — for respiratory conditions, for the joint ailments that age and hard service produced, for the simple relief of warmth after decades of northern winters. That many of them were in their seventies and eighties and had come to Florida to die comfortably does not diminish the ambition of what they built. They died in the sunshine, which was more than they had expected.
Where It Is and What People Do There Now
St. Cloud today is a city of about 60,000 on the south shore of East Lake Tohopekaliga, part of the rapidly growing suburban sprawl that has consumed most of Osceola County in the decades since Walt Disney World opened in neighboring Orange County in 1971. The original veterans' colony identity is preserved in the city's self-description as "The Friendly City" and in the Heritage Museum and local historical society. The lakefront is still there, the fishing still good. The backbone of Florida still divides the watersheds.
What the city is now is mostly Orlando suburban — the kind of community that provides housing for people who work in the theme parks and the tourism industry and the service economy of Central Florida. The descendants of the GAR veterans are gone or dispersed, and the particular culture they created, organized around shared service and mutual care and the specific identity of men who had fought in a great cause, has faded into the general suburban Florida of chain restaurants and subdivisions. The sunshine is still there. The lake is still there. The veterans' city that the old men built from palmetto scrub in 1909 persists, underneath the growth, as a particular kind of American idea: that men who had given something to the country deserved a place to rest in it, in warmth, at the end.
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