During the 1870s,
Hamilton Disston of
Philadelphia took an interest in developing the region while on fishing trips with
Henry Shelton Sanford, founder of the city of
Sanford. Disston contracted with the
Florida Internal Improvement Fund, then in receivership, to pay $1 million to offset its
Civil War and
Reconstruction debt. In exchange, Disston was awarded half the land he drained from the state's swamps. He dug canals and, in 1886–1887, established St. Cloud
sugarcane plantation, named after
St. Cloud, Minnesota, although many longtime locals claim the town was named after
Saint-Cloud, France. Disston opened the
Sugar Belt Railway to the
South Florida Railroad in 1888 to carry his product to market. But the
Panic of 1893 dropped land values, and the
Great Freeze of 1894–1895 ruined the plantation. Disston returned to Philadelphia, where he died in 1896. The Sugar Belt Railway merged into the South Florida Railroad. An attempt to cultivate rice in the area failed, and for several years the land remained fallow. Then in 1909, the Seminole Land & Investment Company acquired as the site for a
Grand Army of the Republic veterans' colony. St. Cloud was selected because of its "health, climate and productiveness of soil." It was first permanently settled in 1909 by William G. King, a real estate manager from
Alachua County who had been given the responsibility "to plan, locate and develop a town." On April 16, 1909, the
Kissimmee Valley Gazette announced the "New Town of St. Cloud", a "Soldiers Colony" near Kissimmee. The newspaper called the
Seminole Land and Investment Company's purchase "one of the most important real estate deals ever made in the State of Florida". It was reported that the company had searched all over Florida for the perfect site for a veterans' colony, particularly one suited for "health, climate, and productiveness of the soil". It is believed that many of the streets were named for states from which the Civil War veterans had served, but the street names were already assigned to the platted land before settlement occurred. Due to the large number of veterans buried in Mt. Peace Cemetery, the latter has been called "one of the largest non-battlefield
Union cemeteries south of the
Mason–Dixon line". Early St. Cloud had a history as a
Sundown Town with a plot of land outside the city reserved for black residents officially dubbed "Colored Quarter". This name is still active on official land records as the title of this section of land. Early newspaper records support the history of being a "Sundown Town" with firsthand accounts of local residents making attempts "to keep the colored folks in their own quarters outside the town". On June 1, 1915, the
Florida Legislature incorporated St. Cloud as a city. Its downtown features landmark buildings by the Orlando architectural firm
Ryan &
Roberts, a partnership consisting of two women. The buildings by Ryan and Roberts and others downtown are predominantly
Spanish Revival. St. Cloud has tried to separate itself from neighboring cities, and particularly the theme parks, by promoting an image of small-town life, and by attempting to make itself economically less dependent on Kissimmee. On March 6, 2006, St. Cloud introduced the CyberSpot program, becoming the first city in the United States to give residents free high-speed wireless Internet access, but the program ended in 2009.
Water tower cross controversy In the late 1960s, the city of St. Cloud was gifted a
Latin cross during the Christmas season. The twelve-foot tall cross, which was illuminated at night, stood atop the city’s water tower off
U.S. Route 192 for nearly twenty years without issue. By November 1986, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed its first lawsuit against the city of St. Cloud to have the cross removed. Four months later, in March 1987, private citizen Ronald Mendelson filed a similar lawsuit that the cross violated the
U.S. Constitution’s mandate of separation of church and state. Mendelson, a Jewish resident who lived east of St. Cloud, decided to sue because of the city’s implicit endorsement of Christianity atop the water tower and the inconvenience Mendelson felt due to the "shadow of the cross". On August 16, 1989, a U.S. District judge ruled in favor of Mendelson to have the Latin cross removed off the water tower. The judge, however, suggested in his ruling that the city replace the Latin cross with a
Greek cross, distinguished for representing a plus-sign, to identify St. Cloud as a crossroad city. The ACLU quickly filed an additional lawsuit, claiming that the new Greek cross still violated the U.S. Constitution in an attempt to evade the judge's original ruling. Local support through the city council to reinstate the Latin cross on private property within St. Cloud was proposed. The original Latin cross has since been moved atop a 60-foot tower on private property in nearby
Intercession City, where it has remained since 1995. ==Geography==