Lost landmark looms large in nation’s roadside heritage
Spring has sprung, with Easter and Passover here once again, bringing a season that in my childhood often meant a Sunday-afternoon auto ramble along Central Florida’s roads.
In those years, I was especially besotted with the Lone Ranger’s radio adventures, so it’s no surprise that my favorite spot on the local roadside landscape belonged to the Wigwam Village motel.
Never mind that those tall tepees sang a song of a West that never was. Their lure was inescapable: 27 gigantic concrete cones arranged in a horseshoe facing the highway, where four more joined them, including a mother-ship tepee that towered above the others and originally housed a restaurant.
Landmark cousins
Orlando’s Wigwam Village was a cousin of six other motels across the country, three of which survive — in Holbrook, Ariz. (on U.S. Route 66), Cave City, Ky., and San Bernardino, Calif. All three are on the National Register of Historic Places.
But the largest of the lot was Orlando’s lost Wigwam Village. It stood at 700 S. Orange Blossom Trail until 1973, when the Sentinel reported its demolition on Feb. 15. We know about its beginnings thanks to research by Orlando historian Tana Porter: The motel’s founder, A.B. Waggener, took out a permit on July 28, 1947, for a building to cost $100,000. 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, Ky., in the Mammoth Cave area, where in 1931 he opened a wigwam-style grill and gas station inspired by a tepeeshaped eatery in Long Beach, Calif.
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 fantasy translation of a Sioux tepee.
In a sort of early franchise agreement, Redford granted his tepee design to folks such as Waggener who wanted to open their own Wigwam Villages. Of the seven eventually built, Orlando’s was No. 4.
Because the motels 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 stands 52 feet high and contains 38 tons of concrete and 13 tons of steel. That’s one sturdy hunk of history.
The builder of the Orlando’s version, Jerry Kinsley, died only recently, 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 the Wigwam Village was torn down 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.)
The big tepees didn’t give up easily. It took about a week to bulldoze them, into a huge pile of concrete and steel that probably went into a landfill.
It’s fun to imagine the Wigwam Village still here on the Trail, between Carter Street and the EastWest Expressway on the north and the Jones High School campus on the south. On a drive into Orlando on the East-West, we’d see that huge horseshoe of gleaming white tepees. They would be a treasure from America’s highway history, like their cousins in Kentucky and the West.
‘Wigwams, Oranges and Dinosaurs’
On Tuesday, April 23, Rick Kilby and I will talk about our shared fascination with Florida’s roadside architecture in a program at Casa Feliz in Winter Park. Titled “Wigwams, Oranges, and Dinosaurs: A Brief History of Florida’s Roadside Architecture,” it’s from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and is free; call 407-628-8200 or email rsvp@casafeliz.us to reserve a spot (Casa Feliz programs sometimes fill up).