“The Faux History of The Villages, Florida”
Amanda M. Brian, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History
Coastal Carolina University
Address:
Coastal Carolina University
P.O. Box 261954
Conway, SC 29528
Phone:
843.349.6653
Email:
abrian@coastal.edu
Biography:
I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and became an assistant professor of history at Coastal Carolina University in
Conway, SC. While my training and teaching has been in modern European
history, this project allows me to apply my research on aging and memory to a
topic in the South, where I now call home. My parents moved to The Villages in
2007, where I was married in 2010.
“The Faux History of The Villages, Florida”
The boundaries of the South at once follow state borders and cultural
values. They correspond to both a geopolitical territory and a collective
experience. To really define this region, Americans have created a mental map
that is itself shifting. Ongoing processes of immigration and emigration and of
ruralism and urbanization as well as the promotion and diffusion of racial tensions
continue to give shape to the South. Most important, perhaps, to this shape is
history. The borders and meanings of the South have been created by the past,
specifically (but not solely) a Confederate past. So, try to imagine a southern
community that makes up its history. While historical preservation projects
revived and remarketed such southern cities as Charleston and New Orleans in the
late twentieth century, the new retirement town of The Villages in central Florida
created and promoted a faux history. Born out of Florida’s post-World War II
population growth and catering to numerous coming-of-old-age Americans, The
Villages’ made-up past draws from the South’s actual past but also the past of the
Northeast, and the West to create a multi-regional identity. This fanciful history as
displayed specifically on building facades in the two areas designated as
downtowns—Spanish Springs and Lake Sumter Landing—provides key insights
not only into place identity in the modern South but also about the operation of
history as a commodity in the contemporary United States.
A visitor to the beautiful downtown of Spanish Springs in the planned
retirement community The Villages, which lies about fifty miles northwest of
Orlando, is struck by the golf-cart-scaled central square flanked by
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complementary buildings and well-manicured sidewalks. Part of the charm
includes the decorated facades invoking nineteenth-century Spanish America,
including a mission-style church. Conceived of by Forrec Ltd., a Toronto-based
firm that designs “entertainment and leisure environments worldwide,” Spanish
Springs has a fictional background laid out on fancy plaques adorning the stuccocovered buildings. The “theming” of Spanish Springs created a Spanish American
community circa 1880s where and when none had existed.i Katie Belle’s, a
perennial hot spot for residents of The Villages, is a “legendary place for good
times throughout the territory,” explains the plaque outlining Katie Belle Van
Patten’s biography. The invented namesake of the nightclub, the plaque
continues, was the “wife of Jacksonville businessman, John Decker Van Patten
who, along with a number of other investors, built the luxurious hotel in 1851” in
which the “Katie Belle Saloon” thrived (Figure 1). This founding date is
prominently displayed above the well-labeled entrance of the “Van Patten
House.” But there had never been such a hotel at that location in the mid-1800s.
The nightclub does not pre-date the 1990s!
It is easy to suspend reality in The Villages. As one Villager wrote in the
blog “The Villages Daily Photo,” a visitor remarked that the Van Patten plaque
“‘looks so authentic that I have to remind myself that I am standing on what was
pastureland a mere decade ago.’” The blogger then quipped, “And so it goes.
Make-believe. But ain’t it fun?”ii Fun was certainly the intention of Forrec Ltd.,
who planned the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando as well as
LEGOLAND Deutschland in Günzburg, Germany. As a self-styled theme park
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for seniors, then, The Villages is well integrated into the entertainment mecca of
central Florida. Florida underwent a transformation in the second half of the
twentieth century to become what historian Gary Mormino has described as a
“state of enchanted reality and shattered dreams” where “fantasies could be
validated . . . on the cheap.”iii The Villages is a fantasy that has been created for
retirees, some 85,000 predominantly over-fifty-five-year-olds. Following a model
similar to Del E. Webb’s Sun City in Arizona, the developers also drew
inspiration from another lucrative enterprise just sixty miles down the toll road:
Walt Disney World.
The Villages has a past—it is just not the one placed on the plaques. The
town was officially founded in 1992, but its brief history extends back to the
1970s. It began as the business venture of Harold Schwartz, who owned a small
trailer park named Orange Blossom Gardens and its surrounding watermelon
fields from an earlier mail-order land sales venture. Schwartz was considering a
$4 million bid for the park when his son, Harold Gary Morse, became his new
business partner in 1983. Together they set about turning the trailer park into
another Sun City, the famed retirement community designed, constructed, and
managed (until 1978) by the Del E. Webb Development Company that opened in
1960 outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Sun City pioneered retirement new towns in
the Sunbelt and helped redefine retirement as well as urbanization in the South.iv
Schwartz and Morse quickly began building golf courses and recreation
centers to sell an active lifestyle to mobile and relatively affluent retirees. It was a
successful highly successful formula. In 1994 The Villages was “among the
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state’s fastest-growing retirement communities,” selling more than 500 houses a
year, while in 1999 the population stood at 22,000, and sales were reported at
between 1,200 and 1,400 houses a year.v The adjectives sprawling and vast have
been used in the last five years to describe the community; a very recent
discussion of central Florida’s astronomical growth prompted a note on the
“megaretirement development The Villages” relying “solely on new residents for
its growth.”vi Even in today’s recession, The Villages continues to expand, albeit
at a slower pace (anecdotes place sales at half the pre-Great Recession rate);
nonetheless, with construction still stalled across the United States at the
beginning of 2012, the continuing development around a laid-out third downtown,
called Brownwood, is comparatively booming.
While The Villages is still seen as new, it has a rather interesting and
dramatic history. Today Schwartz is considered The Villages’ “father” in a
foundational myth very much in line with western historical traditions. Journalist
Andrew D. Blechman reported that when Schwartz died at the age of ninety-three
in 2003, his ashes were placed inside his diminutive statue in a fountain Spanish
Springs (Figure 2). The fountain in the square itself is a deliberate play on the
fountain of youth that has prominently figured in narratives of Juan Ponce de
León’s conquest of Florida. The planner incorporated a Florida legend to create
an amusing story for the fountain, centering on the fictitious character Okie
Peterson. It may also be a particularly powerful story for The Villages’ clientele
who are themselves reinterpreting old age. A substantial bronze plaque on
McCall’s Tavern, a popular bar (complete with a bowling alley) among Villagers,
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describes his made-up biography: Peterson moved to Spanish Springs in 1852 and
opened a business selling as medicine the Spanish Springs water mixed with
“secret ingredients he had discovered while on a botanical expedition to the
Amazon Basin!” His undoing seems to have begun when he claimed that the
water was “actually from Ponce de León’s fabled Fountain of Youth,” and he was
subsequently “shot dead on Main Street by a widow of one of his most devoted
customers” (Figure 3). The story combined a real Spanish explorer and a popular
myth with a tongue-in-cheek tale to create a historical veneer for a mid-1990s
retail and entertainment center.
Schwartz’s diminutive statue in the bubbling “artesian well” in Spanish
Springs appears less solemn and dignified than perhaps one might expect of a
founding father but that, then, is the point. The reference is to another kind of
father: it echoes the Partners sculpture of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse that
appears in Disney parks around the world—minus Mickey Mouse, of course.
Schwartz’s equally open stance and casual suit conveys an enterprising
benefactor’s warmth. He is meant to be beloved rather than revered. So, The
Villages has a visible past, even in Spanish Springs. Other patriarchal references
include the name of major thoroughfares: Morse Boulevard—for cars—and
Morse Recreational Trail—for carts. Residents may reference the boulevard and
trail without reflecting upon its namesake, but the residents do preserve the
Villages’ founding in their sense of social spaces. As the father and son team
planned and built their community, they called each new neighborhood a village
and rechristened Orange Blossom Gardens the “Village of Orange Blossom.” This
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is the “historic area” of The Villages in common parlance. The nickname is
intentionally ironic coming from seniors but it is, in fact, the older part of the
community. Its temporal separation is reinforced by its physical separation, as
Orange Blossom is removed from the rest of The Villages by the busy four-lane
U.S. Routes 441 and 27. To reach the historic area by golf cart, the preferred
method of travel for residents, one climbs a steep bridge spanning the four lanes.
From the highway, the bridge deliberately looks old, with tompe l’oeil cracks in
the stucco revealing brick and balusters along the top of the walls, as it was
designed to also welcome people in vehicles passing under it to “Historic Spanish
Springs.” In comparison to the wide, manicured golf cart paths and larger, nonmobile homes in the rest of The Villages, especially in the newest neighborhoods
around Lake Sumter Landing south of County Road 466, the Village of Orange
Blossom does appear old-fashioned.
The Villages’ past may only span a few decades, but the town was built in
a rural and relatively poor corner of Florida with a deep, rich, and varied history.
Spanish Springs was designed to reference some aspects of this narrative. One
building that houses such businesses as a Kilwin’s Chocolate and a collectibles
stores, for example, has been labeled the “Cattlemen’s Association of Spanish
Springs” building—complete with a prominent “est. 1868” sign. The plaque
correctly states that “long before citrus was crowned king in Florida, timber and
cattle dominated the young state’s economy” (Figure 4). This is accurate: after
achieving statehood in 1845 under divisive circumstances, central Florida’s
economic development included the production of such staple crops as cotton and
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tobacco as well as timber businesses and cattle raising. During the Civil War,
Florida then became an important source for cattle. Cattlemen profited by selling
to the highest bidder, which included both the North and the South as well as
Havana.vii Here the faux history weaves fact and fiction, claiming that “shortly
after the Civil War, riding a wave of profits generated by supplying beef to the
Confederacy, the Cattlemen’s Association of Spanish Springs commissioned and
built this gracious building in 1868 as a monument to their expanding empire.”
This is a simple story of economic triumph that belies the complexity of Florida’s
cattle industry and conflicted position in the Confederacy. Cattlemen in southern
Florida had benefited prior to the Civil War from the removal of American
Indians from good grazing plains at the end of the Seminole Wars.viii There is no
reference in Spanish Springs, however, to the tumultuous conflicts between the
indigenous populations of Florida, other American Indians, and numerous
Europeans in the three and a half centuries leading up to the Civil War. To be
sure, this is a history that is neither simple nor triumphant, as it included the
annihilation and dispossession of American Indians as well as the trading and
possession of slaves. The faux history thus whitewashes Florida’s past.
Producing a fictitious past necessitates glossing over a real past. The faux
history of The Villages is amusing and celebratory. It is not free of calamities, but
even troubles—Peterson’s murderer, the sympathetic widow, spent only one
month in jail, while a fire consumed the Cattlemen’s Association building’s tower
in 1918—are singular and silly. The plaques serve as entertainment not only by
what is told but also by what is not told. The made-up past has prevented The
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Villages’ real past from emerging, but more troubling, it has buried the fierce
colonization and settlement by various actors of Florida. The illusory past that
The Villages presents contains none of the conflict and little of the diversity,
particularly ethnic or racial diversity, of this history. This approach to the past is
decidedly similar to Walt Disney’s approach. Historian Mike Wallace has quoted
a Disney stylist’s explanation of the process: “‘What we create is a ‘Disney
Realism,’ sort of utopian in nature, where we carefully program out all the
negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements.’”ix “Village
Realism” acts similarly: it excises conflict to champion progress, especially
economic progress. It is a deliberately aseptic process, for it both sanitizes the
history of the region and privileges a history of whites of European descent. The
faux history acts as an anesthesia, preventing the sometimes painful complexity of
human events from being acknowledged. For example, south of Lake Sumter
Landing there is an old all-African American cemetery that has been surrounded
by the Village of Caroline (Figure 5). The cemetery, which is still in use by
members of the Spark Level Missionary Baptist Church, is hidden from Villagers
behind high hedges and clump bamboo. Blechman has reported that the cemetery
is connected to one of the earliest settlements in the region, a town founded by
escaped slaves.x It is not simply the specter of death but, more critically, the
legacy of Black Americans that is literally being covered up.
“Village Realism” is a willful amnesia that is taken to new heights when
references to the South is left behind for the New England / Upper Midwestinspired downtown of Lake Sumter Landing and the Old West-themed downtown
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of Brownwood, which is currently under construction. Lake Sumter Landing’s
faux history, though intertwined with the characters of Spanish Springs, conjures
up a non-southern, more generic past. Forrec Ltd., also the designer of Lake
Sumter Landing, explains that this downtown takes the “form of a traditional
nineteenth-century waterfront town, with a town square, a warehouse precinct and
prestigious manor homes.” A “reminder of a bygone era,” the downtown’s
plaques decorate pastel-colored buildings that include a supposed tavern, bait and
tackle shop, bank, schoolhouse, general store, playhouse, fire station,
haberdashery, lighthouse, boarding house, and hotel.xi These elements constituted
for the design the traditional small town.
The celebration of capitalist ventures carries over from Spanish Springs
with its legendary saloon and cattlemen’s association. At the current First
Citizens’ Bank, the “Lake Sumter Historical Preservation League” announces that
the bank was “originally the home of retired sea captain Barnabas Waggoner.”
After some whimsical facts about the builder, the plaque notes that the captain’s
home was “purchased by and converted to The First Bank of Lake Sumter” in
1909. The First Bank of Lake Sumter was not, however, the first bank in the
town; it was actually a young upstart. The First Bank had to fight “for dominance
within the community” against the town’s “original bank, The Old Dominion
Bank.” The plaque signed off, “Old Dominion, however, proved to be less agile
than its younger competitor and was bought out by First Bank in 1922.” This
success story champions the shrewd investors who out-maneuvered the old bank.
More to the point, it connects an imagined past to the actual present: the better
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capitalists were the historical winners. Good business practices ruled The
Villages’ past, just as good business practices are currently ruling the day. It is a
subtle promotion of the present developer’s capitalist acumen.
This message is certainly delivered with charm. The difficulties that banks
in Florida faced in the 1920s, years before the stock market crash, go
unreferenced.xii And there is no signage for a city hall, courthouse, or jail—again,
the operation of law and order was (and is) messy. The Villages is not a
municipality so has no local government; rather, it is “made up of a network of
‘community development districts,’” a common recourse for developers in
Florida. The issue of governance is a point of contention in dueling homeowners’
associations, and the districts recently ran afoul of the IRS over tax-exempt
bonds.xiii Silent on such certainties as death and taxes, the faux history of The
Villages is singularly appealing. Captain Waggoner, who unwittingly built the
future location of the winning bank in Lake Sumter Landing—explains the same
plaque heralding capitalism’s triumph—had moved to the town to “keep an eye
on his eccentric brother, Willoughby, the self-appointed community lighthouse
keeper.” Willoughby’s eccentricity is explained on a posted plaque at “Lighthouse
Point,” which is the Lighthouse Restaurant. He “dressed in the fashion of a
disheveled naval officer,” “referred to himself in the third person as ‘The
Commodore,’” and built “a functioning lighthouse,” which he serviced for
twenty-five years. This is an entertaining figure, and his story is indicative of the
web of associations that has been integrated into the fiction. Biographies and
events connect the community of Lake Sumter Landing, while also referencing
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the new downtown’s association with the first downtown, Spanish Springs. The
real and made-up past of The Villages follows a formula forged by marketers and
tourists. A founding father? Check. A harmless eccentric? Check. A local legend?
Yes, see “The Legend of Bocephus” explained on Lake Sumter’s boardwalk.
Asking almost mockingly “history or fish story,” the plaque declares that
Bocephus was the lake’s very own “sea serpent,” which was caught in 1879 with
a “dead squirrel and a plug of chewing tobacco” by two local boys (Figure 6)!
This is the height of humor in Lake Sumter Landing, which is in and of itself a
fantasy landscape. “Abandoned” train tracks and an “old” water tower complete
the feel of a late-nineteenth-century lakeside village in the vaguely northeast or
upper-midwest regions of the United States.
There are, of course, multiple inspirations for creating a faux history. It
gives a patina of stability to a highly volatile region. Historian Gary Mormino has
described Florida’s tremendous growth in the second half of the twentieth
century, whereby the state “swell[ed] from 2.7 to 15.9 million inhabitants,” as a
“Big Bang.” The term captures the dramatic and explosive transformation that
overtook Florida and fundamentally changed both its landscape and its identity.
Its attractions since 1950 have been purposefully enchanting and relatively cheap,
a heady combination involving theme parks, orange groves, and spring training.
Inspired developers, particularly in central Florida, saw a “capitalist paradise” and
subsequently built and sold condominiums and retirement communities.
Americans’ love affair with automobiles and the project of building roads since
the 1920s contributed to the postwar boom. Mormino has noted that “here, the
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line between realities and illusions is easily blurred.”xiv In The Villages, though,
there has never been such a line to even blur. Fabricated at the turn of the twentyfirst century, The Villages has fully embraced Florida’s dreamstate. The Villages
is designed as a live-in theme park, and the faux history is only one aspect of the
immersion entertainment. Schwartz and, really, Morse attracted new residents to
Florida by realizing a retirement dreamscape; they offered affordable housing at
various price points in a lush, sunny resort dotted with golf courses, pickleball
courts, and retail destinations. Wouldn’t the puzzle be if The Villages did not
offer an enchanted past as part of this lifestyle package?
Much had to change in post-WWII America in order for The Villages to
become a retirement resort. It is not simply the growth in the numbers of
Americans over the age of fifty-five, but also the change in the conceptualization
of retirement that has made The Villages possible. Baby boomers will compose
the largest cohort of American seniors ever. As sociologists and gerontologists
have pointed out, they have had a tremendous impact upon social and cultural
institutions in the United States, and they are now posed to change definitions of
work (as they anticipate working later in life) and to influence the health care
system (as they both become caregivers and in need of extensive care).xv They
have certainly reimagined the concept of retirement as a highly desirable and
worthwhile period of life. Mormino has referenced this as a “seismic mindshift in
the way that Americans thought about aging.” Retirement once connoted “social
uselessness,” while leisure was “morally abhorrent,” but such negative
assessments began to break down in post-WWII United States. Retirees began to
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view leisure in old age as an earned and legitimate activity. Historian John M.
Findlay has suggested that the Del E. Webb Development Company helped to
promote such a concept of retirement to encourage elderly migration, what they
promoted as the key to post-work pleasure.xvi Baby boomers are also revealing
that “senior citizen” is a poor term for defining the various stages of later- and
late-life development. Certainly, Villagers who range from their forties to their
nineties and include a range of retired, semi-retired, and non-retired people are
inadequately represented by current concepts of the elderly. The town newspaper,
the Daily Sun, is a celebration of the myriad of accomplishments that residents
achieve on a daily basis.
Villagers are also among the minority of elderly Americans who have
migrated in old age. Gerontologists have discussed “location in old age” as
primarily a decision between aging in place and migration. Migration has received
more attention, perhaps as a new and highly advertised trend in the late twentieth
century, but the national rate of interstate relocation in retirement is 5 percent
annually, which is lower than other age groups.xvii Elderly migrants have,
however, greatly impacted their adopted communities, changing the economies
and politics of such states as Florida and Arizona. Their choices have helped to
define the Sunbelt, which overlaps but is not coterminous with the South.
Although Blechman decried age-segregated retirement communities, studies have
shown that places like Sun City and The Villages benefit residents. They offer a
“highly supportive setting for aging” and “apparently reverse[] the process of
disengagement.”xviii While a move to an entirely new location can be challenging
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for anyone, a move to be among one’s peers in a homogenous community, like
the kind retirement new towns offer, appears to be less disruptive and even
positive. The homogeneity of a place like The Villages is due, in part, to chain
migration, moving based on recommendations of friends and neighbors. Florida is
populated by migrant northerners who follow local and regional patterns of
settlement: French Canadians flock to Fort Lauderdale, Jewish New Yorkers to
Miami, etc. The Villages has even been referred to a “colony” of Staten Island.xix
The homogeneity of The Villages is also a by-product of class, race, and gender
distinctions among the elderly population. Retirees to Florida are more likely to
be white and wealthy, and slightly more likely to be female.xx
In The Villages, one’s “place identity,” a “well of meaning derived from
the personal memories and symbolic significance associated with place,” is
tested.xxi Residents are always from somewhere else, and those regional identities,
sometimes at odds with each other and with the South, continue to be cultivated
via states’ clubs and sports teams. The golf cart often becomes an expression of
place identity with prominent team banners and old license plates serving as
common decorations. But the named villages serve as placeholders, too: the
current village of residency gives helpful clues to new acquaintances regarding
length of residency, location, and class status. The faux history of The Villages
also contributes to the creation of a new post-retirement place identity. John
Decker and Katie Belle Van Patten were originally from Jacksonville, while the
Waggoner brothers of Lake Sumter Landing were from Maine. The Spirodan
family, who were described as the caretakers of Mrs. Van Patten’s modest cottage
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in Lake Sumter Landing, had immigrated from Greece in the later half of the
nineteenth century, one of a few families of direct European descent. These
stories all involve voluntary migrants. The inventions all follow a similar pattern
in the historical blurbs: the place that the personality came from is named and thus
recognized as important, and the current residency of the personality is named as
well as dated. There is an international and regional mixing, albeit a
circumscribed mixing. This pattern runs parallel to the migratory patterns and
identifications of the very real residents of the neighborhoods surrounding
Spanish Springs and Lake Sumter Landing.
Villagers have migrated for amenities, for leisure activities like golf and
pickleball in a mild climate as well as long-term health care needs. The pristine
condition of the landscape contributes greatly to decisions to relocate.xxii The faux
history is part of that dreamscaping, and it seems to be one mechanism for
creating an entertaining environment. I suspect, however, that residents of The
Villages may be very interested in and welcoming of historical knowledge about
the location and region of their retirement homes. The Villages Daily Sun, for
example, runs features on such local heritage tourism as the Dade Battlefield
Historic State Park in Bushnell and the Scottish Highland Games in Winter
Springs. Villagers, as they are predominately white Americans ranging from
lower-upper-class to middle-middle-class socio-economic backgrounds, tend to be
better educated and better traveled than their peers. As older Americans, too, they
tend to view history in personal terms. In another sense, The Villages is an
amazing living archive, as the population itself holds vast memories of past
15
events. It is an enclave of rich autobiographies that appears to me more fragile for
having ceded ground to “Village Realism.” But “Village Realism” will
unfortunately continue to shape the community in the absence of substantial
discussions and visual markers about the past.
List of Figures (photographs by author)
Figure 1: Katie Belle Van Patten plaque
Figure 2: Statue of Harold Schwartz
Figure 3: Okie Peterson plaque
Figure 4: The Cattlemen’s Association Building
Figure 5: Spark Level Missionary Baptist Cemetery
Figure 6: Legend of Bocephus
i
“Who We Are” and “Spanish Springs at The Villages,” Forrec Ltd.
(website), accessed January 17, 2012, http://www.forrec.com/company.html and
http://www.forrec.com/re_villages.html.
ii
“The Van Patten House: Thursday, July 16, 2009,” The Villages Daily
Photo (blog), accessed January 19, 2012,
http://thevillagesdailyphoto.blogspot.com/2009/07/van-patten-house.html.
iii
Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History
of Modern Florida (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2005), 3.
Peter Mitchell, “Retirement Community Profits by Luring Bargain
iv
Hunters to the Palmetto Patch,” The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1994;
Andrew D. Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in a World Without Children [or
Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias] (New York: Atlantic
16
Monthly Press, 2008; Barnes & Noble Nook Version, 2010); and John M.
Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Alan Oser, “Around Orlando, A Sharper Focus on Downtowns,” New
v
York Times, December 12, 1999.
vi
For example, see Abby Goodnough, “Florida Is Slow To See the Need
To Save Water,” New York Times, June 19, 2007; Julia Lawlor, “United States of
Florida,” New York Times, February 2, 2007. Quote from Jeff Kunerth, “Orange
expected to lead Florida growth,” Orlando Sentinel, July 10, 2011.
vii
Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables, FL: University
of Miami Press, 1971), 181-195, 232-233.
viii
Tebeau, A History of Florida, 195.
ix
The Disney Theme Show: From Disneyland to Walt Disney World, A
Pocket History of the First Twenty Years (Walt Disney Productions, 1976),
Volume 1, 31, as quoted in Mike Wallace, “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying
the Past at Disney World,” in Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on
American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 137n6.
x
Blechman, Leisureville, 139.
xi
“Lake Sumter Landing,” Forrec Ltd. (website), accessed January 17,
2012, http://www.forrec.com/re_sumter.html.
xii
Tebeau, A History of Florida, 192-193, 394.
xiii
Blechman, Leisureville, 100; Gary Fineout, “Florida Communities Pay
Attention to a Tax Case,” New York Times, July 10, 2009.
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xiv
Mormino, Land of Sunshine, 2-3.
Michael A. Smyer, Elyssa Besen, and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, “Boomers
xv
and the Many Meanings of Work, ,” in Boomer Bust? Economic and Political
Issues of Graying Society, vol. II, The Boomers and Their Future, ed. Robert B.
Hudson (Westport, CT: Praeger Perspectives, 2009), 3-15; and Mary F. Harahan
and Robyn I. Stone, “Who Will Care? Building the Geriatric Long-Term Care
Labor Force,” in Hudson, ed., Boomer Bust? 233-253.
xvi
Gary R. Mormino: “Sunbelt Dreams and Altered States: A Social and
Cultural History of Florida, 1950-2000,” Florida Historical Quarterly 81, no. 1
(2002): 6; and Findlay, Magic Lands, 166. See, also, William Graebner, A History
of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885-1978
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). Findlay, Magic Lands, 171-181.
xvii
Philip B. Stafford, “Living Large while Living Small: The Spatial Life
of Aging Boomers,” in Hudson, ed., Boomer Bust? 169-170.
xviii
Findlay, Magic Lands, 197-198.
Lawlor, “United States of Florida.”
xix
Mormino, Land of Sunshine, esp. chap. 4, “Old Folks at Home: The
xx
Graying of Florida.”
xxi
Stafford, “Living Large,” 171.
xxii
Stafford, “Living Large,” 172-173.
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