The Naming of Orlando, Myth, Soldier, and Sentinel Tree

The story Orlando tells about itself begins with a soldier and a sentinel tree. According to local tradition, a man named Orlando Reeves died somewhere near what is now downtown Orlando in eighteen thirty-five, killed in a skirmish with Seminole warriors while standing guard so his companions could sleep. His companions buried him and carved his name into a tree to mark the grave.

When settlers arrived to file land claims, they mistook the carved name for a place name and called their settlement Orlando. The truth, as historians have found, is considerably murkier. No military record of an Orlando Reeves has ever been confirmed.

The name may instead honor Orlando Rees, a South Carolina cattle rancher and sugar planter who was in Florida at the time. Or, in the version most commonly accepted, a settler named James Speer proposed the name after the Shakespearean character Orlando in As You Like It. What the founding myth does capture, even in its uncertainty, is the quality of early Central Florida itself: spare, provisional, defined by the vast wet prairies called flatwoods and the long horizon of a peninsula that seemed, to northern eyes, simultaneously blank and full of latent possibility.

The land east and south of the town was hammock country, shaded by live oaks draped in Spanish moss, laced with spring-fed lakes. To the west lay the pine flatwoods that would one day become the corridor for a highway and a theme park. The settlement that became Orlando was chartered as a town in eighteen seventy-five and the seat of Orange County.

It was a small crossroads then, fewer than one hundred residents, hemmed in by orange groves and cattle range. The myth of the sentinel soldier fit the place: a story about vigilance, and about standing alone at the edge of something unknown.