Four towns. Three of them fade into the background of rural obscurity. And one clearly doesn’t belong with the others. Most people know only the outlier, the one in Florida, the one with the tourists and the mouse.
Orlando. I imagine few people realize or care about the other towns named Orlando. However, each had its own own story, including one that had a legitimate shot at fame-and-fortune. And none them have anything to do with Disney. Those who don’t care probably aren’t followers of Twelve Mile Circle, either.
Orlando, Kentucky
I found very little information on the Orlando in Kentucky. It’s barely a bump in the road along the train tracks. It does have its own ZIP Code, 40460. However, the post office building itself disappeared. Maybe it combined with one nearby. I don’t know. There’s not much here anymore other than a few single-wide trailers on the edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest.
Orlando, Oklahoma
Things get a little less sleepy as one rolls into Orlando, Oklahoma. where visitors even encounter a roadside sign proclaiming their arrival. At least this one seems to recognize itself as a full-fledged town. Just about two hundred people lived here at the time of the 2000 census.
Not Much Today
The spot is large enough to have its own bare-bones Wikipedia entry. Nonetheless it does no justice to the town’s significant place in history. It seems to be a pretty quiet community that’s faded in recent years judging by my Google Street View drive-by. There are plenty of homes. One the other hand, businesses along its primary road all shuttered. Could it have something to do with the three Walmarts located within twenty miles of here?
What Might Have Been
Orlando could have been one of the largest cities in Oklahoma, rivaling maybe even its Floridian counterpart. Then history created winners and losers, and this one lost.
Oklahoma was Indian Territory in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. One part became the Unassigned Lands. Here, the Creek and Seminole Indians ceded property to the United States after the Civil War. So the land stood virtually empty and ripe for settlement.
The Unassigned Lands became an excellent choice for the first of several Oklahoma land runs organized by the Federal government to settle Oklahoma. Towns sprung up overnight when homesteaders rushed into the Unassigned Lands in 1889 at the sound of the signal shot. Oklahoma City and Guthrie both recorded populations of greater than 10,000 by the end of the first day.
Orlando fell within the far northern extreme of acreage involved in that initial rush. It stood just below an even larger rush occurring a few years later. There, a mad scramble took place for homesteads in the Cherokee Outlet (often called the Cherokee Strip erroneously) which stretched fifty seven miles south from the Kansas border. Orlando, since it already existed, served as a primary place for people to register their Cherokee Outlet claims. More than 36,000 people showed up in Orlando on September 15, 1893 with that exact intention.
Funny thing, Oklahoma City now has a population of a half-million but Orlando dropped to only two hundred. Unfortunately Orlando hits it heyday that very first day in 1893.
Orlando, West Virginia
Another rural Orlando arose in West Virginia (map). It’s so small that the asphalt trail leading to it is fractional: County Road One-Fourth. Actually It’s probably County Road One slash Four (dual designated). But I couldn’t let that stand in the way of a good story.
One encounters the most interesting sites lurking in these quieter corners of the Intertubes. I didn’t expect to find much on Orlando, WV, like its counterpart Orlando, KY. Despite that, local historians banded together to preserve its history. This small town features prominently in a well-tended blog called Orlando Stone Soup.
“In the heart of the West Virginia hills, at the edge of the Little Kanawha River Basin, is Oil Creek with its several tributaries. It was first settled at the beginning of the 1800s. At the confluence of Clover Fork & Oil Creek the town of Orlando developed in the late 1800s and withered in the mid 1900s. For two hundred years a small community has loved, worked, fought dreamed and worshiped here and raised new generations to do the same. Here are some of the stories of that community.”
I wandered around the website for quite awhile. I browsed through vintage images and absorbed the memories of generations who grew up among those hills and hollows. The lead article on the day I visited was called A Granddaughter Remembers Orlando Visits. It included the recollections of 84-year-old Ruby Jarvis Brooks, illustrated with a map and family photographs. I love these types of websites and the authors did this one particularly well.
Orlando, Florida
When Orlando comes to mind it’s usually the one in Florida, right (map)? This is the one I’ll be visiting for most of next week. Although frankly, I think I’d prefer to be at any one of the other three. For some reason my employer likes to hold meetings down here. So I’ve probably visited this Orlando at least a dozen times.
I suppose they think people consider it a privilege but it gets old after awhile. Strip away Disney World and the rest of the fluff and there’s not much to Orlando. Well, except for excessive suburban sprawl in a warm climate. Does anyone know of anything worth seeing for someone who’s traveled here way-to-many-times? Any geo-oddities including those of the hyper-local kind? I’m envisioning a very boring week trapped in a hotel room.
Circling back to an earlier theme, what would Orlando have become had Walt not solidified his land holdings in the 1960’s? The Orlando metropolitan area had only three hundred thousand residents in 1960 and more than two million inhabitants in 2008.
One wonders…
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