MYSTERY OF NAME TRACKED DOWN LONG, WINDING TRAIL

Last week we began with the seemingly simple question, “Where did the name Orlando come from” and began an answer that ambles through twists and turns.

There’s more to tell. Let’s recap what we know and look at some more findings by historical detectives.

LEGEND IN STONE, NOT FACT

The traditional favorite story about the name Orlando centers around the heroic tale of a Seminole-fighting U.S. soldier named Orlando Reeves, supposedly killed near Lake Eola (which in the 1800s was called Sandy Beach Lake, by the way).

That’s the version memorialized on an impressive-looking marker at the southeast corner of Lake Eola Park.

A visit to it this week reminded me the inscription has been refreshed since it was paid for and put in place by Cherokee Junior High students in 1939. Letters carved in marble say the marker was restored in 1992 by 1942 Orlando High School graduates at their 50th reunion.

Nevertheless, historians are as close to certain as one can be in this uncertain world that there was no Orlando Reeves. Federal military records are quite reliable, they say. He’s just not there.

But he has a perpetual life of sorts through the Lake Eola monument, reinforced by the marker’s proximity to the statue of a Confederate soldier, gun steady on his shoulder.

The two stone memorials aren’t in the least related historically, but perhaps there’s some kind of unconscious connection between the Orlando Reeves stone, with its engraved story of a noble, long-ago soldier, and the statue, ever vigilant above the flower beds. And so, though he never existed, the soldier Orlando will probably always be with us.

An aside: That statue of the Confederate soldier in Lake Eola started out in downtown Orlando in 1911, a gift to the city from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Its original location was at Central Boulevard and Main Street, now Magnolia — in the middle of the intersection. By 1917, it was becoming a traffic hazard, according to Eve Bacon’s history of Orlando, and was moved to its present location in Lake Eola Park.

BUT REES WAS REAL

If Orlando Reeves is a figment of folklore, there did live in the mid-19th century a man named Orlando Savage Rees, a planter from South Carolina who also owned large estates in Florida and Mississippi.

Bacon’s book says that on a trip to Central Florida in 1955, Mr. F.K. Bull of Pinopolis, S.C., told local newspapers he “had been brought up on the story” that the city of Orlando was named for his great-grandfather, Orlando Rees.” And correspondence to Flashback this week from Charles M. Bull Jr. of Orlando also offers information about this Orlando Rees, his great-great-grandfather.

Local librarian and historical detective Eileen Willis came across Orlando Rees in the mid-1970s in an 1832 diary entry by John James Audubon. The great painter and student of bird life mentioned meeting a Mr. Rees who owned a gracious home at Spring Garden, about 12 miles south of Lake George, in what’s now Volusia County.

Willis also discovered on microfilm a letter Rees wrote from his Charleston, S.C., home in March 1837 to federal authorities in Washington, asking the government not to conclude a peace treaty with the Seminoles unless the agreement provided for the return of slaves taken by the tribesmen, or for money to make up for the losses.

Orlando Rees apparently was among the sugar-growing planters who had been burned out of the area by Seminole attacks on or just after Christmas Day 1835 (the year of the fictional Orlando Reeves’ death).

One story says the real Orlando led an armed expedition to track the Seminoles and recover his stolen slaves and cattle. His route might have taken him through what is now downtown Orlando.

“Some historians theorize that Rees may have left a pine-bough marker with his name on it next to the military trail to show other searchers where he had been,” historian Mark Andrews has written. Someone might later have seen the sign, mistakenly read it as “Reeves” and also assumed it was a grave marker. But the real Rees is not buried here. He returned to South Carolina, where he died in 1852 at the age of 58.

A GRAVE TALE

Whether by association with Orlando Rees or the mythical Orlando Reeves, stories of a spot called “Orlando’s grave” run through the lore about the city’s name.

The reference turns up in a persistent story about Judge James Gamble Speer, the area pioneer and lover of Shakespeare who clearly seems to have named Orlando. (He also helped make sure the settlement, rather than Apopka or Sanford, became the county seat of Orange County in 1856 –but that’s another story for another day.)

Speer arrived from South Carolina at Fort Reed (Sanford) in 1854, when the area’s non-Native American inhabitants were few in number.

He moved to the Lake Ivanhoe area, where he planted cotton, and then on a little farther south to Lake Gatlin. He eventually settled in Oakland in west Orange County.

According to a story passed down by William B. Hull, who was at the meeting to name the new county seat, several names had been suggested and the arguing was hot and heavy when Speer rose and said, “This place is often spoken of as ‘Orlando’s Grave.’ Let’s drop the word ‘grave’ and let the county seat be Orlando.”

The historical tradition among Speer’s descendants is firm, though, that the judge’s real motive in choosing the name was his fondness for Shakespeare — and that he had in mind the character Orlando in As You Like It.

In a conversation this week, Speer’s great-great-grandson, Jack Ross of Windermere, said that was the story he had been told by his mother, Catherine Sadler Ross, as well as by other members of the family.

The Shakespeare connection becomes even more viable when you consider that along with the Bible, the works of the Bard were standard public-school reading in Judge Speer’s era, as they continued to be in the early 20th century.

A biography of President Harry S Truman, born in 1884, describes him avidly reading Shakespeare as a boy and acting out scenes with his cousins.

And to quote Harry Truman (if a little out of context), the buck — and story of Orlando — stops here.

We don’t know the whole story, but this we do know:

There was no Orlando Reeves.

A planter named Orlando Rees was in the area during the early 1830s.

A grave, real or imagined, was associated in old legends with the name “Orlando.”

Judge James Gamble Speer did the naming, inspired at least in part by the words of his language’s greatest writer.

That’s a pretty good place for any city to get its name.

DATEBOOK

Pirate re-enactors are set to swashbuckle in Orlando at the History Center’s Buccaneer Bash Friday (11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.) and Saturday (11 a.m.- 4:00 p.m.). Details: 407-836-8500.

Originally Published: January 28, 2001 at 12:00 AM EST