Source:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-mrsfowler07dec09,0,2024834.story
Isabel Fowler is the citrus tycoon behind what we now call Winter Garden Villages at Fowler's Grove.
This one-time Winter Garden citrus magnate looks back at her long life and sees . . . a new Wachovia branch.
by Wes Smith Sentinel Staff Writer, December 9, 2007
A year after selling the last of the big citrus homesteads in West Orange County, Isabel Fowler realized that she could no longer tell where her home of 63 years had stood.
"My grandson went out with a GPS and found that a new Wachovia Bank now sits where my house was. I thought that was appropriate," said Fowler, a New Englander who became matriarch of a pioneering Central Florida citrus family.
Canned Christmas music now trills across the pavement covering much of her family's former grove land. Nearly every day, a new shop, restaurant or big-brand store opens on what will be one of the state's largest open-air retail centers.
Bitterly opposed by some area residents but already crawling with holiday shoppers, this sprawling cornucopia of commerce known as Winter Garden Villages at Fowler's Grove sits on 175 acres at State Road 535 and State Road 429.
One hundred businesses, including more than 20 eating spots, will occupy Fowler family land titled in 1882 under U.S. homestead laws that allowed settlers to acquire up to 160 acres by living on it and cultivating it for five years.
Squeezed
Isabel Fowler was one of the last holdouts against developers among the area's longtime citrus growers. Their fruits juiced Central Florida's economy at a time when its swampy, mosquito-infested environs held little allure for tourists. At the industry's peak in 1968, citrus groves covered 68,000 acres in Orange County. Less than 4,500 acres remain.
Like many area growers, the Fowlers were forced to sell off pieces of the family's 500 acres to stay afloat as frosts, storms and economic forces cut into their profits. But she held on to most of the land, even as other citrus families sold out.
"Land values have gotten so crazy there is no way you can make that kind of money growing oranges, but it's an emotional process to sell family groves," said Winter Garden grower Jerry Chicone, whose holdings have dropped from 1,000 acres to several hundred.
In the end, the Fowlers' timing proved impeccable. Though family members declined to discuss the selling price, public records show that the Fowlers sold their groves and wetlands for about $23.7 million to The Sembler Corporation of St. Petersburg.
"Through freezes and hurricanes, they held out and got the optimum price, I congratulate them for hitting the peak of the market," said citrus grower Bert Roper, a former neighbor whose family pioneered the Winter Garden area.
Selling the family's long-held groves was difficult, but the Fowlers felt they had little choice, given foreign competition, inclement weather, encroaching development, and new roadways running through their property.
"We had not made a profit in the orange groves since the 1989 freeze," said Isabel Fowler. "There is a limit to how many years you can go without making money."
Most regrettable, she said, was her inability to save the family's grand 1922 British-colonial-style farm home, which was too big to relocate.
"One day it was there, and the next it was gone," she said. "That bothered me."
Upon selling the house and the land around it, Fowler and her grandsons -- Hal and Steve Bekemeyer -- purchased 95 acres of former groves to the south on Lake Avalon.
There, she built an elegant mansion with indoor pool based on plans drawn up by her late husband, Harold Fowler, while he was a soldier pining for home in World War II.
"I love my new home, and I like not having to worry about freezes and droughts," she said. "I try not to look back."
New England transplant
In the New Hampshire village of Alton in the resort area of Lake Winnipesaukee, local gossip once had it that the three Twombly sisters would never amount to much.
All those girls did was watch movies and dance day and night, scuttlebutt said.
"But we all became teachers," said Isabel (Twombly) Fowler.
She isn't quite sure whether to blame Harold Earl Fowler Jr.'s flashy second place finish in a Lake Winnipesaukee diving contest, or his even flashier Whippet Roadster convertible, for her falling in love with the Florida boy.
"He was 18 years old, and I was 16, and he was 6-feet-3-inches tall and handsome, so I just couldn't wait for him to come back the next summer," she recalled.
But when Harold Fowler next returned to his family's summer cottage, he was married. "So I went to college and taught school," said Isabel Fowler. "Then he had a daughter and got divorced, and came back to New Hampshire and asked a mutual friend, 'Who did Isabel Twombly marry?'
"No one," was the answer.
"So then he asked me for a date, and we got married in 1942," she said.
Isabel was 29 years old, but her father opposed the marriage and cried at her wedding.
"He thought he'd never see me again, so he tried to discourage me by telling me all the things I wouldn't have in Florida, like electricity," she said.
Her father was correct as it turned out. Battery-operated lights offered the only illumination on the Fowler's remote homestead. Air-conditioning was also lacking.
"For the first few years, I got up every hour on the hour and took a cold shower," she said. "It was vastly different from New Hampshire."
She adjusted to the weather and to a new line of work.
"I didn't know anything about growing oranges, or growing anything," she said.
But bookkeeping was the bane of her outdoorsman husband, so Fowler took charge of the grove's financial records.
"I finally said, 'You take care of the outside, and I'll take care of the inside' -- and he readily agreed," she said.
They worked as a team until her husband died in 1992 at the age of 82. Her grandson, Steve Bekemeyer, who grew up in the groves, managed them until they were sold.
This New England resort-town girl turned Florida-citrus matriarch will celebrate her 95th birthday on Friday, removed from the scent of orange blossoms for the first time in many years.
"I especially miss that smell because we lived with a grove all around us. It didn't do any good to put on perfume because you couldn't smell anything but the orange blossoms," she said. "But that's progress, so they say."
Her stepdaughter, Jane Bekemeyer, 76, also has learned to deal with the change in her family's circumstances.
"Now instead of telling people I was born in Fowler Groves, I say I was born just south of the new Macaroni Grill," she said.
Wes Smith can be reached at
dwsmith@orlandosentinel.com or at 407-420-5672
I guess I missed Iowa when I did my comparisons 30 years ago and I forgot about how big Wisconsin is, but as big as FL is (it is big enough that I am almost closer to Canada than the other end of the state--by road only 50 miles difference), there are several western states that are more than double the area. I remember when I did the comparisons, I was surprised by NY. 