On a December morning in 2013, a sizable crowd of Winter Park residents stood along Lake Osceola and watched a 4,200-square-foot historic house, sliced cleanly in half by hand tools, drift past on a raft of nine barges pinned together. Each half weighed about 100 tons. A 50-ton crane waited on the far shore.
The whole stunt cost roughly half a million dollars, raised in four months by a coalition of preservationists who refused to let the 1885 Capen-Showalter House meet a wrecking ball. And the organization steering the rescue? The Albin Polasek Museum.
That alone would earn a spot in Florida lore. But honestly, it's just the wildest chapter in a much longer story, and that longer story is the real reason the Albin Polasek Museum has quietly become one of Greater Orlando's most distinctive cultural landmarks.
So let's rewind. About 134 years.
Table of Contents
A Boy from Moravia Who Carved His Own Destiny
Albin Polasek was born on February 14, 1879, in Frenštát, a small village in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today part of the Czech Republic. At 14, his parents shipped him off to Vienna to apprentice as a woodcarver.
By 22, he was on a boat to America, arriving in 1901 with the kind of resume that would give any modern career coach chest pains: skilled hands, no English, no contacts, and no real plan beyond a vague gesture westward.
So he carved altars for Catholic churches across Iowa and Wisconsin. He saved his money. And in 1905, he somehow talked his way into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied under the celebrated American sculptor Charles Grafly.
Two years later, still a student, he produced what would become his signature work: Man Carving His Own Destiny, a figure emerging from the very block of stone that contains him.
Polasek later described himself, with zero apparent irony, as "a block of stone transported to the Land of the Free." He became a U.S. citizen in 1909.
Three years later, he won the Prix de Rome. As you do.
Rome, Chicago, and Four Decades of Bronze
The Prix de Rome bought Polasek three years at the American Academy in Rome, where he hung out with Paul Manship and produced The Sower, a bronze nude that earned an honorable mention at the 1913 Paris Salon. It also caused a brief scandal when it was displayed outdoors at the Art Institute of Chicago. Edwardian Chicago, it turned out, had Strong Opinions about nude bronze farmers.
By 1916, the Art Institute had decided his talent outweighed the gossip. They invited him to head their Department of Sculpture, a post he held for nearly 30 years. According to the National Park Service, Polasek became known simply as "the Chicago artist," producing more than 400 works in stone, bronze, plaster, and wood across his long career. Four hundred. Take a moment with that number.
His commissions read like a tour of early 20th-century civic America: The Spirit of Music in Grant Park, a Woodrow Wilson Memorial in Prague, a Theodore Thomas Memorial sketched in carved wood, and Victorious Christ and Virgin of the Corn for St. Cecilia's Cathedral in Omaha.
Late in his career, he produced Victory of Moral Law (1957), a cast aluminum piece that took on the Hungarian Revolution as its subject and won acclaim around the world. The National Academy of Design made him an Associate Member in 1927 and a full member in 1933, the kind of back-to-back honors that quietly cement a reputation.
The Stroke, Two Marriages, and the Florida Years
In 1949, at age 70, Polasek did what plenty of Midwesterners with savings and good knees still do: he retired to Florida. He bought a slice of land on Lake Osceola in Winter Park and personally designed a stucco home with tile roofs and warm ochre walls, a Mediterranean love letter to the Moravian villages of his childhood.
He sketched the gardens himself, treating the property as one continuous sculpture pedestal, which is why the future Albin Polasek Museum still feels less like an institution and more like an artist’s private daydream you happen to be allowed to walk through.
Months after moving in, he suffered a devastating stroke. His left side was paralyzed. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
For most artists, that's the end of the story. For Polasek, it was the second act. Working with only his right hand, he kept drawing, kept painting, kept modeling clay, and even kept carving stone, completing 18 more major works before his death. One of the last was a monumental limestone version of Man Carving His Own Destiny, chiseled around 1960 with the help of his assistant Robert A. Baille. Read that again slowly.
The artist whose entire identity hinged on the metaphor of a man freeing himself from rock finished the definitive version of that piece while seated in a wheelchair, in his eighties, using only one hand. That's the kind of biographical detail that makes you put your coffee down.
In late 1950, at age 71, Polasek married former student and fellow sculptor Ruth Sherwood, who had been gently nagging him to keep working. She died 22 months later. Some of her own pieces, including Boy with Bear, are still in the collection.
In 1961, he married Emily Muska Kubat, and together the couple founded the Albin Polasek Foundation, which opened the home, studios, and gardens to the public that same year, at the sculptor’s own request. That moment, in 1961, is when the Albin Polasek Museum officially began.
Polasek died on May 19, 1965, at age 86. He's buried beside Ruth in Winter Park's Palm Cemetery, a five-minute drive from the house where he made his last sculpture. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty perfect ending.
How the Albin Polasek Museum Became a Florida Landmark
The Albin Polasek Museum has run as a nonprofit since the day it opened, funded by memberships, donations, and admissions, with every dollar going right back into the grounds. The home itself is preserved more or less the way Polasek left it, original furnishings and all, and that's a big part of the magic. You're not walking through a generic gallery. You're walking through an artist's living room. There's a difference, and you can feel it.
Recognition came in waves. The U.S. National Register of Historic Places added the site to its rolls on May 2, 2000, listing it as the "Albin Polasek House and Studio." The same year, Polasek was named a Great Floridian. In 2004, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame for what the state called a "strong and sustained commitment toward the development of cultural excellence."
Here's the kicker: today the Albin Polasek Museum is the only Florida site in the Historic Artists' Homes and Studios program, an affiliate of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Translation: it's in the same exclusive national club as the homes of Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Winslow Homer. If you live in Central Florida, that's a fact worth absorbing on a slow Saturday afternoon, ideally with a cold drink.
The Time They Floated a 100-Year-Old House Across a Lake
Okay, back to the house-on-a-barge story.
In 2013, the Capen-Showalter House, built in 1885 and one of the only homes still standing from Winter Park’s founding decade, was scheduled for the wrecking ball. The Albin Polasek Museum partnered with the Winter Park History Museum and the Friends of Casa Feliz to save it, joined by a small army of community donors. They had four months. They needed roughly half a million dollars. They raised it.
Then they did the unthinkable. They cut the 4,200-square-foot house in half. By hand. Each 100-ton half was loaded onto nine barges pinned together and winched across Lake Osceola in December 2013, with that 50-ton crane handling the heavy lifting on the receiving end. The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation handed the team its 2014 Organizational Achievement Award, which feels like the bare minimum given that they literally moved a house across a lake.
Today, the rebuilt Capen House on the Albin Polasek Museum campus serves as event space, classroom, exhibit hall, and one of the more memorable wedding venues in Central Florida. It's also one of the most photographed buildings on the Albin Polasek Museum grounds, which makes sense. How many wedding venues can say they once arrived by boat?
Inside the Collection
The Albin Polasek Museum collection is bigger than the house lets on. More than 500 objects by Polasek alone, including sketches, paintings, molds, and finished sculptures, plus thousands of archival pieces: letters, photographs, press clippings, legal documents, the works. The outdoor gardens hold more than 50 sculptures on permanent display, including pieces by Polasek, Ruth Sherwood, and a rotating cast of contemporary artists.
The headliners include Man Carving His Own Destiny in limestone at the entrance, a 1962 cast of The Sower, the carved wood sketch for the Theodore Thomas Memorial, plus Aspiration (1914), Unfettered (1924), Forest Idyl (1924), and Victory of Moral Law in cast aluminum. It's a serious roster.
The Albin Polasek Museum hosts four rotating gallery shows a year, mixing Florida-based artists, open-call exhibitions, and Czech artwork that nods to Polasek's heritage. Recent and upcoming shows include Renaissance Alchemy: Egg & Gold, featuring North Carolina artist Sandy Thibeault, on view from December 2025 through April 2026.
The signature annual event is the Winter Park Paint Out, a plein air festival the Albin Polasek Museum has grown over 17 years into a regional tradition. The 2025 edition brought 22 working artists onto the grounds and around Winter Park to paint live, easels everywhere, sometimes finishing a canvas in a single afternoon. It's the kind of event where you wander up, watch a stranger turn a tree into oil paint in real time, and then go get tacos. Highly recommended.
Why It's Worth Visiting
There are bigger museums in Central Florida. There are flashier ones. But there is exactly one place where you can stand under a live oak on the shore of Lake Osceola, look up at a limestone figure carving itself out of stone, and know that the man who made it finished the piece from a wheelchair, in his seventies, after starting his life as a 14-year-old apprentice in a Moravian woodshop.
The Albin Polasek Museum is the kind of small, specific, deeply human place that doesn’t really exist anymore, hiding in plain sight fifteen minutes from downtown Orlando, at 633 Osceola Avenue in Winter Park. Bring a friend who loves a good story. Stay for the gardens. Then come back next season for whatever the Albin Polasek Museum has hung on the walls next.
🔥 Want more Orlando history just like this? Well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://polasek.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albin_Polasek https://aarome.org/news/features/archives-albin-polasek https://www.nps.gov/people/albin-polasek.htm https://polasek.org/history/ https://dos.fl.gov/cultural/programs/florida-artists-hall-of-fame/albin-polasek/ https://artistshomes.org/sites/albin-polasek-museum-sculpture-gardens/ https://www.orangeobserver.com/news/2013/dec/31/capen-house-completes-its-move/ https://polasek.org/the-collection/
