Before The Fires

The Downtown Winter Garden business section, prior to the 1909 fire, is seen below in this view looking east along Plant Street at its intersection with Main Street. W.B. Burch, who arrived on December 1, 1909, reminisced in 1940 that he was "just a barefoot boy" when he disembarked from the train:

"Plant Street was just a bed of sand filled with wagon wheel ruts; facing it and the railroad were the stores’ wooden frames with front porches."

The Dillard and Boyd General Merchandise store seen here served the public with standard goods on its first floor and caskets on the second floor. On the side of the wooden building, housing Dr. Davis’ Pharmacy, is an advertisement for Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey, a curative for "coughs, colds, asthma and grippe." These buildings all burned in the fires of 1909 and 1912 and were almost immediately replaced with brick structures.

In the photograph above, the camera faces south at the intersection of Main and Plant Streets in this early 1900s view of Downtown Winter Garden, before the fires of 1909 and 1912 destroyed the wooden structures. The tall building on the right is A. B. Newton's Dry Goods store, which later became Dillard and Boyd’s General Merchandise store and the site of the Dillard and Boyd brick building in 1912. Behind Newton’s store is Croft and Jones Grocery. Behind the building at the left, the two-story Orange Hotel can be seen in the distance. In the background are Tavares and Gulf Railroad cars; the depot, unseen in this photo, is just to the right of the train.