Florida Southern College appears firmly settled beside Lake Hollingsworth, but permanence was one of the last things it acquired.
The college began in Orlando in 1883 as the South Florida Institute, operating from a four-room building with four teachers and fifty-eight students. Orlando had no public schools at the time, so the institution provided both preparatory and collegiate instruction. Its name soon changed to Wesleyan Seminary and then Wesleyan Institute, the first of several attempts to describe an institution that was still deciding what it would become.
Its Methodist identity, however, was present from the beginning. Established through the work of the Florida Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the school belonged to a wider denominational effort to provide higher education within a state that was still thinly populated and unevenly developed. A college in late nineteenth-century Florida could not depend upon an established network of wealthy benefactors, large cities, paved roads, or generations of alumni. It had to persuade families that education was worth the journey and persuade communities that a college was worth sustaining.
Orlando apparently failed that test before it became the Orlando familiar today. In 1886, the trustees moved the institution to Leesburg, which they regarded as the city with the brighter future. History occasionally demonstrates its sense of humor by allowing reasonable people to make confident predictions. The school occupied an unfinished educational building, adopted the formidable name High School and College of the Florida Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and was more conveniently called Florida Conference College. Joshua Hollingsworth became its first official president.
The Leesburg years brought greater stability, but not permanence. In 1902, the college moved again, this time to Sutherland on Florida’s Gulf Coast, in the area now known as Palm Harbor. There it became the Florida Seminary and, in 1906, Southern College. By then, the institution had accumulated enough names and addresses to suggest either remarkable adaptability or an inability to remain where anyone had last placed it.
Sutherland might have become the college’s permanent home had nature shown greater respect for institutional planning. Storms struck the campus. Influenza disrupted its community. Fires caused devastating damage during the early 1920s. Southern College retreated temporarily to a hotel in Clearwater Beach, exchanging the conventional college campus for accommodations that must have made student life seem either unusually luxurious or deeply improvised. The move was intended as an emergency measure, but emergencies have a way of deciding questions that committees postpone.
Lakeland offered the college another beginning.
In 1922, Southern College moved inland to the shore of Lake Hollingsworth, settling on land that had been part of a citrus grove. The location placed the school in a city whose development had been shaped by railroads, phosphate, citrus, and the ambitions of central Florida. Lakeland sat between Tampa and Orlando without being absorbed by either. It was large enough to support an institution but still small enough for the college to become part of the city’s identity rather than merely another property within it.
The move also carried a curious historical symmetry. Joshua Hollingsworth, the college’s first president in Leesburg, had been born in Polk County, and Lake Hollingsworth had been named for his uncle, the pioneer John Henry Hollingsworth. The wandering college had arrived beside a lake bearing the family name of its first president. It would be tempting to call this destiny, although geography often looks more purposeful after everyone has stopped moving.
The trustees adopted the name Florida Southern College in 1935. The new title was broad enough to contain the institution’s past and confident enough to suggest that it had finally stopped searching for a place to live. The college had already been the South Florida Institute, Wesleyan Seminary, Wesleyan Institute, Florida Conference College, Florida Seminary, and Southern College. Each name marked an effort to define its mission, its affiliation, or its geography. Florida Southern College sounded less provisional.
Its survival mattered because private higher education in Florida was not inevitable. The college had endured inadequate financing, repeated relocation, storms, disease, and fire. It had opened to both men and women during an era when coeducation remained unusual. It had maintained its Methodist affiliation while gradually expanding beyond the narrower purposes of a denominational school. Today, it identifies itself as Florida’s oldest private college, a claim that becomes more impressive when one considers how often the institution might reasonably have ceased to exist.
Florida Southern is now commonly introduced through the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work gave the Lakeland campus its international reputation. That story deserves its own telling. Yet Wright did not rescue a nameless college from obscurity by himself. He encountered an institution that had already spent half a century practicing the art of continuation.
The college had moved until it found Lakeland. It had changed names until it found one capacious enough to keep. It had survived disasters that erased buildings but failed to erase the institution itself. Only after all of that could Florida Southern undertake the audacious architectural experiment that would become the Child of the Sun.
The most remarkable thing about Florida Southern College may not be that it possesses an extraordinary campus. It is that, after beginning in a four-room schoolhouse and wandering across the Florida peninsula, it survived long enough to build one.