Winter Garden Hotels

The Orange Hotel, on the east side of South Main Street, and the Bell House, on North Main, were the city’s first hotels. Both were wood frame structures accommodating visitors, bass fishermen, and salesmen who arrived in town on the train. W.B. Burch’s memories of early Winter Garden tell us that:

"[A] large, three story wooden building known as the Orange Hotel stood about where the Lafayette Apartment Building is now [31 South Main Street]. On rainy nights the cows would gather on the front porch to spend the night. Cattle ran out in those days and were as much at home on the streets as the citizens."

Neither the Orange nor the Bell stand today. The Orange Hotel burned in the 1912 fire. The Shelby Hotel (1913) and later the Edgewater Hotel (1926), both constructed of brick, took the place of the town’s original wooden lodgings.