Cousin of lost Orlando icon thrives
Many folks itch for “bucket list” travel to exotic world-famous sites. Others, including some in the Dickinson family, hear the call of more quirky destinations with links to America’s roadside past — links even to a lost Orlando icon: the Wigwam Village Motel that once reigned on South Orange Blossom Trail.
Torn down in 1973, it was one of seven similar “tourist courts” across the country, three of which still exist — in Holbrook, Arizona (on the famous U.S. Route 66), San Bernardino, California, and Cave City, Kentucky. They’re all on the National Register of Historic Places.
Late this summer, my brother, Bill, and I visited the oldest survivor, Historic Wigwam Village No. 2, in Cave City. Built in 1937, it’s being lovingly restored by new owners Keith Stone and Megan Smith, who bring to the project a background in architecture (Stone) and an interest in historic preservation (Smith). From the original hickory furniture to the restored neon sign, it was a roadside-history fan’s idea of heaven.
Largest of the lot
Orlando’s Wigwam Village rose at 700 S. Orange Blossom Trail about a decade after its Cave City cousin, on property that included 3.5 acres of citrus trees. With 27 concrete-cone units arranged in a horseshoe facing the highway, where four more joined them, Orlando’s version was the largest of the seven Wigwam Villages. Its founder, A.B. Waggener, hailed from Kentucky, where the story of America’s Wigwam Villages
begins.
About 1930, a fellow named Frank Redford returned from a trip to California to Horse Cave, Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave area, where in 1931 he opened a grill and gas station inspired by a “tepee”-shaped eatery in Long Beach, California.
By 1933, Redford had added 15 tepee-shaped cabins for travelers at
Horse Cave, and in 1937 he patented his “wigwam” design featuring stucco walls over a steel frame, a kind of a fantasy translation of a Sioux dwelling from the Great Plains.
In a kind of early franchise agreement, Redford granted his design to folks such as Waggener who wanted to open their own Wigwam Villages. Of the seven eventually built, Orlando’s was No. 4, following No. 3, built in 1940 on U.S. Route 61 in Metairie, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans.
Because the motels all followed Redford’s design, it’s likely that a description of the surviving one at Cave City also applies to its Orlando cousin. The central tepee at Cave City — which originally housed a restaurant — stands three stories tall and contains 18 tons of steel.
The builder of the Orlando’s Wigwam Village, Jerry Kinsley, died in December 2018 at age 101. Kinsley served as mayor of Edgewood for 17 years; his company also oversaw the construction of Winter Park Pines and other large projects.
After Waggener and Kinsley’s creation was destroyed in 1973 to make way for a Days Inn, a former Days Inn official told the Sentinel that the company tried to save some of the tepees — one plan called for airlifting them by helicopter to a YMCA summer camp — but they were too heavy to move. (The motel on the site is now the Vacation Lodge.) It took about a week to bulldoze the Wigwam Village.
Whimsy, not accuracy
There was much more whimsy than accuracy in Redford’s tepee design. On the website for Historic Wigwam Village No. 2,
Stone and Smith take on the question of cultural appropriation — the use of elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. In this case, that was the inaccurate appropriation of American Indian culture as part of a tendency to romanticize the American West. It’s not a good thing, they note.
Nevertheless, the Wigwam Villages are a part of Americana and a door to conversations about the use of our past. Redford’s creations helped make travel across America available and affordable for everyone, Stone and Smith note. At two fire pits in the center of their Kentucky motel’s grassy, tree-lined acres, they invite guests to gather in the evenings, put their feet up, sit under the stars and talk to one another — just as they might have done in the early days of auto travel. It’s a history worth preserving. To learn more, visit historicwigwamvillage.com/
What’s going on
A bronze portrait of journalist Mabel Norris Reese is slated to be unveiled Sept. 24 at 10 a.m. in Mount Dora’s Sunset Park, 230 W. 4th Ave., during a program titled “A Celebration of Courage,” presented by the city and the Mount Dora Chamber of Commerce. The dedication will feature Reese’s granddaughter Cindy Chesley Erickson, sculptor Jim McNalis, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King, whose 2012 book “Devil in the Grove” brought Reese international attention. Details: RememberMabel. com.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson @icloud.com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter to Florida Flashback, c/o Dickinson, P.O. Box 1942, Orlando, FL 32802.