Orlando, Florida

• 1. Introduction

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  Orlando, Florida sits 42 miles inland from the Atlantic coast and 77 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, a placement that shaped its entire destiny. A city of 307,573 people at the 2020 census, it ranks as the fourth-most populous city in Florida and the most populous city in the state without a coastline. Its metropolitan area holds roughly 2.67 million residents. Over 3.5 million tourists visit each year, making it the fourth-most visited city in the United States, trailing only New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles. None of this was inevitable. For much of the 19th century, this patch of central Florida wetlands was an obscure cattle settlement caught between Seminole wars and a post office dispute. How did a frontier outpost become a place that now hosts more theme parks than anywhere else on earth? The answers involve a contested name, a catastrophic freeze, a wartime airfield, and one man named Walt Disney announcing a plan in 1965 that changed everything.

• 2. A Name No One Agrees On

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  The post office moved to a new downtown location in 1857 and opened under the name Orlando, dropping the old settlement name of Jernigan. The trigger was partly practical and partly disgrace: Aaron Jernigan, the community's founding cattleman, had been relieved of his militia command in 1856 after conduct so troubling that United States Secretary of War Jefferson Davis wrote that Jernigan's militia were "more dreadful than the Indians." By 1859, Jernigan and his sons stood accused of murder. The name Jernigan needed to go. But what Orlando meant was a question nobody could settle cleanly. At a meeting in 1857, a local resident named James Speer rose during an argument and suggested the settlement use the name Orlando, saying the place was often referred to as "Orlando's Grave" and proposing they simply drop the word grave. The most colorful legend behind that phrase centers on a man called Orlando Reeves, allegedly a sentinel killed by Seminoles on the banks of Sandy Beach Lake in 1835. A memorial beside Lake Eola, first placed by students of Orlando's Cherokee Junior School in 1939 and updated in 1990, still marks the supposed spot. A review of military records conducted in the 1970s and 1980s found no evidence that anyone named Orlando Reeves ever existed. A competing candidate is a South Carolinian cattle rancher named Orlando Savage Rees. Rees owned a Volusia County sugar mill and plantation, had estates in both Florida and Mississippi, and his sugar farms in the Orlando area were burned in the Seminole attacks of 1835 - the very year of the Reeves legend. In 1832, the naturalist John James Audubon met Rees at his large estate at Spring Garden, about 45 minutes from Orlando. Rees's great-grandson F. K. Bull told an Orlando reporter in 1955 that their ancestor was the city's namesake, and years later another descendant offered local historians the same account. Speer's family has long claimed something different entirely: that Speer named the settlement after the protagonist in Shakespeare's play As You Like It, his favorite work. In 1975, a local historian and county commission chairman named Judge Donald A. Cheney cited a letter in which Speer called Orlando "a veritable Forest of Arden, the locale of As You Like It." Downtown Orlando today has a major street called Rosalind Avenue, which is the name of the heroine of that same play.

• 3. From Cattlemen to Citrus Barons

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  Isaac and Aaron Jernigan, cattlemen from Camden County, Georgia, arrived in July 1843 under the terms of the Armed Occupation Act, acquiring land two miles northwest of Fort Gatlin along the west end of Lake Holden. They were not arriving in empty country. The Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823 had established a Seminole reservation across much of central Florida, including this area. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the later Treaty of Payne's Landing set in motion the Second Seminole War, and Fort Gatlin itself had been established on the 9th of November 1838 by the 4th U.S. Artillery under Lieutenant Colonel Alexander C. W. Fanning. By the mid-1850s, enough settlers had arrived to make a more centrally located courthouse desirable, and the new town of Orlando, laid out in 1857, consisted of four streets surrounding a courthouse square. The Town of Orlando was incorporated on the 31st of July 1875 with just 85 residents, only 22 of them registered voters. It became a city in 1885. Between 1875 and 1895, Orlando earned a reputation as the hub of Florida's citrus industry, a period still recalled as the Golden Era. That era ended abruptly with the Great Freeze of 1894-95, which destroyed independent groves and consolidated the citrus trade into the hands of a few large operators who moved their operations south, primarily around Lake Wales in Polk County. Many Orlandoans left for the North, California, or the Caribbean in the freeze's aftermath.

• 4. War, Steel, and Runways

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  Orlando became a popular resort in the years between the Spanish-American War and World War I, and the 1920s Florida land boom drove land prices sharply upward and produced dozens of new neighborhoods near downtown. Several hurricanes struck Florida in the late 1920s, and the Great Depression cut the boom short. World War II reshaped the city's geography in lasting ways. The Army stationed personnel at Orlando Army Air Base and nearby Pinecastle Army Air Field, and some of those servicemen stayed on after the war. In 1956, the aerospace and defense company Martin Marietta, now known as Lockheed Martin, established a plant in the city. Pinecastle Air Force Base was renamed McCoy Air Force Base in 1958 to honor Colonel Michael N. W. McCoy, who had commanded the 320th Bombardment Wing there before dying in the crash of a B-47 Stratojet bomber north of Orlando. The base later became home to B-52 Stratofortress and KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft. In 1968, it was transferred to the Navy and became Naval Training Center Orlando. When McCoy AFB closed in 1976, its runways and surrounding territory became Orlando International Airport, which today ranks as the seventh-busiest airport in the United States and the eighteenth-busiest in the world. Naval Training Center Orlando was completely closed by the end of 1999 by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission and converted into the Baldwin Park neighborhood.

• 5. Disney Changes Everything

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  In 1965, Walt Disney announced plans to build Walt Disney World in central Florida. Disney had considered Miami and Tampa but chose Orlando's inland position partly to reduce hurricane exposure. Coastal regions faced greater storm risk. The resort opened in October 1971, about 21 miles southwest of Orlando in Bay Lake, and it triggered an economic transformation that reshaped the metropolitan area into what it is today. The metropolitan area now spans Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Lake Counties. Universal Orlando resort followed in 1990 as a major expansion of Universal Studios Florida, and it is the only major theme park located inside Orlando city limits. A record 75 million visitors came to the Orlando region in 2018, making it the top tourist destination in the United States that year. The city now hosts seven of the ten most visited theme parks in North America. The Orange County Convention Center, expanded in 2004, is the second-largest convention facility in the United States, trailing only McCormick Place in Chicago. Orlando vies with Chicago and Las Vegas for the most convention attendees in the country annually. The new Universal Epic Universe theme park opened on the 19th of May 2025 along the northern section of International Drive.

• 6. A City of Many Languages

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  Puerto Ricans make up the largest Latino subgroup in Florida, and Orlando holds the fastest-growing Puerto Rican community on the mainland United States. Between 1980 and 2010, the overall Latino and Hispanic share of Orlando's population rose from 4.1 to 25.4 percent. By the 2020 census, Hispanic or Latino residents accounted for nearly 33 percent of the city's population of 307,573. In addition to Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Colombians, and a large and growing Brazilian population all have a notable presence. Portuguese-language signs and information can be found throughout Orlando International Airport. A large non-Hispanic Caribbean population includes Haitians, Jamaicans, Bahamians, and Trinidadians. According to data from the National Immigration Forum, the majority of Orlando's foreign-born population comes from Latin America, with Mexico, Colombia, and Haiti representing the three largest individual countries of origin. From Asia, the largest groups come from the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. From Europe, the United Kingdom represents the largest single source. As of the 2006-2008 American Community Survey, about 69 percent of residents over age five spoke only English at home, with Spanish speakers making up roughly 19.2 percent of the population. Orlando also holds the 20th-highest percentage of LGBTQ+ residents among American cities, at around 4.1 percent of the population, and is home to Florida's first openly gay city commissioner, Patty Sheehan.

• 7. Music, Movies, and Tragedy

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  Orlando contributed heavily to the boyband wave of the mid-1990s. The Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and O-Town all formed in Orlando before their mainstream breakthroughs. The alternative rock groups Matchbox Twenty, Seven Mary Three, and Alter Bridge also hail from the city, as do the metal bands Death and Trivium. In 2023, gaming YouTuber Dream, who is based in Orlando and has accumulated 40 million combined subscribers, signed a recording deal with Republic Records. The 2019 single "223's" by YNW Melly and 9lokkNine was the first US Billboard Hot 100 entry by an Orlando-based hip hop act. Orlando also had a stretch as a film production hub. In the mid-to-late 1990s it was nicknamed "Hollywood East." The implosion of the city's old City Hall served as a set piece for Lethal Weapon 3. In 1997, Walt Disney Feature Animation operated a studio at Disney's Hollywood Studios that produced Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, and the early stages of Brother Bear before closing in 2004. The Florida Film Festival draws budding filmmakers from around the world. On the 12th of June 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and wounding 60 others. At the time it was the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history. Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer announced plans to acquire the Pulse property in November 2016. The city eventually purchased it in October 2023 for $2 million. As of 2025, the city is advancing plans for a permanent Pulse Memorial with an expected completion date of late 2027, featuring a 49-column angel ellipse with rainbow glass panels honoring each of the victims.

• 8. The Tech and Defense Layer

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  Beneath Orlando's tourist economy runs a substantial technology and defense industrial base that rarely appears in travel brochures. The metro area's technology industry employs 53,000 people across a sector valued at $13.4 billion. Central Florida Research Park, which covers over 1,025 acres near the University of Central Florida, is the seventh-largest research park in the country. It houses more than 120 companies employing over 8,500 people and serves as the hub of the United States military's simulation and training programs. Metro Orlando is home to the simulation procurement commands for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Lockheed Martin maintains a large manufacturing facility in Orlando for missile systems and aeronautical research. The Orange County Convention Center hosts the world's largest modeling and simulation conference near the end of each year: the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, known as I/ITSEC. The University of Central Florida, closely associated with Orlando, had a total enrollment of 69,320 students as of fall 2023, making it the fourth-largest on-campus student body of any public university in the United States. Darden Restaurants, the parent company of Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse and the largest operator of casual dining restaurants in the world by revenue, is headquartered in Orlando and moved to a new headquarters and central distribution facility in September 2009.