Quick quiz for the next time you are stuck in traffic on Morse Boulevard: how old is Winter Park, and where exactly did it start? Most people who live around here have no idea, which is a shame, because the answer is genuinely great. The whole city traces back to one building and one dinner party.
That building was the Rogers House Inn, which once stood at the southeast corner of Morse Boulevard and Interlachen Avenue, and it holds a title no other spot in Central Florida can touch. It was Winter Park's very first hotel, and the room where the city basically threw its own birthday bash.
For those of us who live in greater Orlando, this is a fun reminder that the leafy, walkable Winter Park we love did not just sprout up on its own. Somebody planned it, paid for it, and toasted it into existence over a meal. And the Rogers House Inn was sitting right in the middle of the action.
It is the kind of local history that rewards a little curiosity. Most of us cruise past these corners on autopilot, running errands and circling the block for parking.
But follow the streets back far enough and you land on a single building and a single evening. The Rogers House Inn is where the whole story kicks off.
Table of Contents
A Birthday Dinner for Seven
The doors swung open on April 8, 1882, a date that has since been crowned the official founding date of the City of Winter Park. That evening, real estate visionary Loring A. Chase hosted a celebratory dinner for a grand total of seven guests at the Rogers House Inn. It was a cozy little gathering, the sort you could fit around one big table, and yet Chase counted that meal as the official start of Winter Park as a working resort community. Not bad for a party that small.
Consider the timing. The inn was only the second building constructed in the brand-new village, right behind the South Florida Railroad depot that had gone up a few months earlier in March 1882. With almost nothing else around, the hotel became the town's social headquarters practically overnight. It even housed Winter Park's first post office, which made the building a hotel, a hangout, and a government office all rolled into one.
Today, when Winter Park circles April 8 on its civic calendar, it is pointing straight back to that dinner table inside the Rogers House Inn.
Two New Englanders and a 600-Acre Bet
The inn was no spur-of-the-moment whim. It was the showpiece of an ambitious plan cooked up by two transplanted New Englanders: Loring A. Chase from Chicago and Oliver E. Chapman from Massachusetts. In 1881, the pair scooped up 600 acres surrounding Lakes Maitland, Osceola, Virginia, and Killarney for $13,000, with their sights set on building Florida's first planned community, a winter retreat made to order for wealthy Northerners fleeing the cold.
Their blueprint was no rough sketch. They carved out three elevated, five-acre lakefront lots specifically for first-class hotels. One became the Rogers House Inn. The other two grew into the grand Seminole Hotel and the Alabama Hotel, rounding out a trio that would define the town's reputation for decades.
The corner of Morse and Interlachen was picked on purpose. It sat a short walk from the new railroad depot and a string of pretty lakes, exactly the mix of convenience and scenery that Chase and Chapman figured would lure affluent visitors south. Chapman bought into the dream so completely that he built one of the first homes in Winter Park that same year, on Interlachen Avenue along Lake Osceola. When you think about it, these two men were essentially drawing a city onto a blank Florida map, and the Rogers House Inn was the anchor they built everything else around.
Life Inside the Rogers House
So what was it actually like to stay there? Thanks to Loring Chase's own scrapbooks, kept between 1881 and 1906, we get a surprisingly vivid picture. The Rogers House was described as “pretty and unique,” and was noted as steadily doing “a pretty fair business,” with fifteen or more guests in residence at any given time through the winter season. Full house, more or less.
The inn built a reputation for being “run on a high order.” Guests came back year after year, and the scrapbook notes give a shout-out to Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, the proprietors who lent the building its name, for the warmth they showed visitors. In an era long before review sites and star ratings, repeat guests were the highest praise a small hotel could earn, and the Rogers House Inn seems to have racked them up season after season.
And that sense of community is not just folklore. The University of Central Florida's Special Collections still holds the Rogers House guest register from 1882 to 1915, a primary-source document recording the names and hometowns of visitors across more than three decades. For local history buffs, it is a rare, tangible peek at who was passing through early Winter Park and where they were coming from.
It is easy to romanticize a place like this, but the records keep it honest. The Rogers House Inn was a small operation that simply did the job well: clean rooms, friendly hosts, repeat guests, and a steady winter trade. In a town that barely existed yet, that quiet competence gave the young community a reliable place to gather, eat, and do business.
Enter Charles Hosmer Morse
In 1904, the property turned a new page under a name that still pops up all over Winter Park. Industrialist Charles Hosmer Morse, founder of the Fairbanks-Morse Company of Chicago, bought the Rogers House Inn for $7,000 and renamed it the Seminole Inn. He added steam heat, made the building bigger, and gave it the kind of polish well-heeled Edwardian-era travelers expected.
Morse's fingerprints are all over the city locals enjoy today. He also snapped up the nearby Knowles home at 231 Interlachen Avenue, renamed it “Osceola Lodge,” and donated Central Park to the city. His name now graces the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, home to the world's largest collection of work by Louis Comfort Tiffany. So if you have ever wandered Central Park during a festival or admired Tiffany glass on a rainy afternoon, you have Morse to thank, and, in a roundabout way, the little hotel he got his start with.
The Virginia Inn Years
The hotel swapped owners again in 1915, this time selling for $20,000, nearly triple what Morse had paid just eleven years earlier, and got rebranded as the Virginia Inn. Under that name it ran for five more decades.
All through those years, it held its own next to the grander Seminole Hotel on Lake Osceola as one of Winter Park's celebrated lakefront stays. Together, the Seminole, the Alabama, and the Virginia formed the trio that built the city's name as a top-shelf winter escape. Marketing pamphlets of the day, including one tucked away at UCF, hyped the “New Seminole Hotel” and the Virginia Inn side by side, selling Winter Park's hospitality to Northern visitors chasing sunshine.
It is worth lingering on that $20,000 sale price. In a little over three decades, this corner lot had leapt from a seven-guest dinner party to a property worth a small fortune. The bet Chase and Chapman placed back in 1881 had paid off, and then some.
The End of an Era
After more than 80 years and three different names, the Rogers House Inn was torn down in 1966 to make room for the Cloisters Condominiums on Lake Osceola. It was the last survivor of Winter Park's founding-era trio of hotels. The Seminole Hotel had burned back in 1902, and its rebuilt replacement was demolished in 1970. The Alabama Hotel was converted into condominiums in 1979.
Here is the fun twist: the building that opened first was also the one that stuck around longest, outlasting its fancier neighbors by a comfortable stretch before the wrecking crews finally showed up. By the time it came down, the Rogers House Inn had quietly clocked more years of service than any of the famous hotels it once shared a skyline with.
Why the Rogers House Inn Still Matters
It would be easy to file all this under “neat old story” and get back to your day. But the legacy here is genuinely stitched into Winter Park's identity. As one hospitality developer put it, the city “was founded in a hotel”, and that hotel was this one.
For greater Orlando residents, there is something oddly satisfying about knowing your favorite weekend stomping grounds began with seven people and a shared meal. The polished restaurants, the museum, the lakefront views, the brick streets, all of it loops back to a deliberate plan and a single dinner on April 8, 1882. So the next time you are parked on Morse Boulevard, glance over toward Interlachen Avenue and picture the modest little inn that started the whole thing.
Winter Park's history museum and the local library archives keep this story alive for anyone curious enough to go digging, and they are well worth a visit if the corner of Morse and Interlachen has caught your interest. A landmark does not have to be standing to shape the place you call home.
And the next time conversation turns to how old Winter Park really is, you can win the room in one line: the city is exactly as old as a dinner for seven at the Rogers House Inn. Not a bad piece of trivia to keep in your back pocket the next time you play tour guide.
From a seven-guest supper to a beloved local landmark still talked about more than a century later, the Rogers House Inn remains the quiet little starting point of one of Central Florida's most cherished cities. The bricks are long gone and the condos went up decades ago, yet the story refuses to fade.
That is the funny thing about origins: you can tear down the building, but you cannot tear down the beginning.
So the next time you find yourself near the corner of Morse and Interlachen, give it a nod.
The Rogers House Inn earned it.
🔥 Love Orlando history like this? Well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://myfloridahistory.org/date-in-history/april-08-1882/rogers-house-inn-opens
https://cityofwinterpark.org/government/about/history/ https://thechapman.com/history-of-winter-park/ https://lib.rollins.edu/olin/oldsite/archives/golden/oechapman.htm https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1935&context=cfm-texts
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-texts/790/ https://www.wphistory.org/explore/timeline/ https://www.orangeobserver.com/news/2018/sep/20/exploring-winter-parks-hotel-history-with-the-winter-park-history-museum/ https://winterparklibraryarchives.org/exhibits/show/histbisref/the-seminole-hotel https://www.atriummanagement.com/blog/henderson-hotel-vision--adam-wonus https://winterparklibraryarchives.org/exhibits/show/winter-park-history-reference-/historic-homes-in-winter-park/osceola-lodge
