By Brendan Bunting O’Connor from the Spring 2025 Edition of Reflections Magazine Baldwin Park, located just minutes from downtown Orlando, is a vibrant and picturesque community that combines modern living with a deep sense of history, and just a dash of Stepford-like planned-community plastic falseness. One of the things that

By Sarah M. Boye, from the Spring 2025 Edition of Reflections from Central Florida On a breezy fall day, a group of tour attendees stood solemnly by the grave of Osborne Brooks in Orlando’s Greenwood Cemetery, listening as the tour guide explained his family’s connection to the city. Like many

By William S. Morgan V. from the Spring 2025 Edition of Reflections from Central Florida In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, a man arrived on the Central Florida frontier with a vision of how its untamed wilderness might be transformed. Where others saw only dense forests, swamps, and

By Adedoyin Adekunle and Justine Truc, 2024 University of South Carolina Oral History Fellows The Orange County Regional History Center’s oral histories cover a wide range of topics, including narratives from the Volusia County community of Cassadaga, sometimes called the “Psychic Capital of the World.” Such narratives are recalled in

By Rachel Williams from the Spring 2025 Edition of Reflections Magazine “The one-stop shopping center of tomorrow that’s here today” – that was the tagline in the Orlando Sentinel when Colonial Plaza officially opened on Jan. 31, 1956. What might seem like an ordinary shopping center to 21st-century residents was