The Great Search

As someone who loves to travel, I thought it would only be fitting for me to research how tourism has changed in Winter Park over the last hundred years or so.  When I first began looking in the archives for anything that could be useful, I found that most of the newspaper clippings, magazine articles and other documents were generally going back to no earlier than November of 1965, which is when the Orlando Sentinel reported that Walt Disney Productions, now the The Walt Disney Company, had purchased 27,400 acres to build The Florida or Disney World Project, which later became Walt Disney World.  I have only come across one article that focuses on Winter Park, Rollins College and the historic homes surrounding it, the old train station, and Park Avenue.  The remainder of the other articles in the folder I searched through relate to either Walt Disney World, the Walt Disney Company, the several other theme parks in the Orlando area, tourism in the Orlando area in general, how the Orlando area has been affected by the tourism industry, and records of the estimated number of people visiting the Orlando area and how the methods of transportation visitors took to arrive in Orlando.  This week I'm going to visit the Winter Park Historical Museum to see what they have on tourism that relates to Winter Park and not its neighbor I-4, Walt Disney World.