The Oviedo area was first known as the Lake Jesup Settlement. On Lake Jesup's southern shore, John F. Mitchell built the first store in 1870, and about two years later Jacksonville merchant Antonio Solary built another store with a larger wharf to the west. Solary's Wharf became the site of the Lake Jesup post office, where mail and passengers arrived weekly from Sanford on the steamboat Volusia. It served the Central Florida area until the railroad was built from Sanford in 1886, after which the Oviedo post office, established in 1879, became the community's only post office. In 1882, lake area fruit growers incorporated the Lake Jesup Steamboat Company by acquiring the shallow-draft, flat-bottomed steamboat Isis, which sank that same year north of here in Lake George, part of the St. Johns River. George H. Browne, storekeeper at Solary's Wharf, became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 1887. In 1888, Oviedo orange growers formed the Oviedo, Lake Charm & Lake Jessup Railroad, planned to end at Solary's Wharf; although the line never operated, it helped force the South Florida Railroad to lower unfair fruit-hauling rates.