The NEW subdivision near the cache is the actual site of the "Florida Central Academy". I hid this cache in honor of my wife Carol, who attended the last year of this wonderful old Florida High School.
Florida Central Academy occupied the building and grounds of the 150 room Mount Plymouth Hotel, located in Lake County, Florida. Finished in 1926 at a cost of $350,000.00, the building was the centerpiece of a golfing resort. Al Capone, Connie Mack, Babe Ruth, and singer Kate Smith were among the hotel's guests. He and several New York and Chicago gangsters were believed to have used it as a hideaway. Aviation was the way that people got to the Mt Plymouth Hotel from within Florida and from out of state. The aircraft were mostly privately owned and were flown into the resort. There was a stagecoach that operated from Sanford.
The school operated from 1959 until June of 1983. Originally a boy's school, the Academy opened its doors to girls in 1971. Classes in grades 7-12 were offered, and students from around the world attended. The school also accepted 'day students' from the local area. In it's heyday, it was considered one of the finest college preparatory boarding schools in the United States. In May of 1983, the last class of 20 seniors graduated. On June 8, 1983, the property became the custody of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. A federal bankruptcy judge ordered the school closed and all business transactions halted pending the settling of claims from more than 330 of the school's creditors. Four days later county health officials condemned the building as unfit for human habitation.
The building quickly fell prey to vandals. Plumbing was ripped out, walls bashed in, windows broken and graffiti painted on the walls. At 3:20 pm on January 6, 1986, the Mount Plymouth Fire Department. received a phone call informing them that the 'empty school' was on fire. Mount Plymouth firefighter Catherine Davis, first on the scene, said "If we only had a few other people out here, we might have saved it." The two water towers behind the building had been empty, so firefighters were forced to truck water from a mobile home park two miles away. Forestry Service firefighters used a bulldozer to plow a fire line around the building. Hundreds of people from the surrounding area came to watch the fire. The smoke from the blaze could be seen as far away as Sanford and Orlando, and by nightfall the tiny community of Mount Plymouth was capped with a glow of orange. It took two days to put the fire out. On January 7, three teenage boys admitted to investigators that they had set fire to the run down and empty building the day before. Two three story wings were destroyed.
The two story south wing was saved, though heavily damaged. The building owner, Dianne Seelie, a Chicago real estate broker, said she would have the rest of the building torn down. Her parents bought the structure in 1959 and leased it to the Academy. She had put the property on the market in 1985 with an asking price of $650,000. "I've had so many people call me and express their regrets over what happened. It's a great loss to the community," Seelie said to the Orlando Sentinel.
