E.C. Stuart, one of the founders of Lake Wales, first arrived in Central Florida in 1887 at age 35 and found success in Bartow in brick making, lumber, turpentine, and phosphate. In 1911, Stuart and principals of the Sessoms Investment Company, C.I. Johnson, G.V. Tillman, and B. K. Bullard, formed the Lake Wales Land Company with Stuart as president, then hired civil engineer A.C. Nydegger to survey and plat a two-mile-square township for a planned community, from which the town of Lake Wales emerged. As the township grew, Stuart's Bartow brickyard supplied many early Lake Wales buildings, and he built the first municipal water system and first electric plant. He funded, furnished, and donated the land for the town's first church, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian, built in 1913, and also donated land for the Baptist Church. The park property remained in the Stuart family for more than ninety years until the City of Lake Wales acquired it in 1994. Central Florida remained largely a wild, undeveloped frontier through most of the nineteenth century, with significant settlement beginning only after the Seminole Wars in 1858. After the turn of the century, railroads became the main means of travel, and the Atlantic Coastline Railroad reached this spot from the north on June 11, 1911, spurring an economic boom in the emerging community of Lake Wales on the shores of Lake Wailes. Early surveyor Col. J.W. Childs had named the lake for Sydney I. Wailes, Florida's State Agent in Washington, D.C., but when the local depot was built, city leaders dropped the "I" from the station name because Wailes suggested an overtone of distress, and Wales became the official spelling when the city was incorporated in 1917. Extending south along the railroad from the park to the original town, the Historic Corridor leads to an area designated a National Register Historic District in 1989 and includes the E.C. Stuart bungalow, circa 1920, the 1916 Seaboard Airline Freight Depot, a 1920 frame cottage that successively housed the first Public Library, Women's Club, Music Club, and Board of Trade, and the 1928 Atlantic Coastline Passenger Depot, all restored as museums depicting the community's early life and development.