Garden Grove was carved out of the Chocochatti Hammock, first inhabited by the Upper Creek Nation and later by pioneer families including the Hopes and Crums, and it remained largely undeveloped until the 1920s, when Florida’s land boom reached the state’s west coast and spurred Hernando County developments such as Hickory Hill, Russell-Hale Heights, Mundon Hill Farms, Dixie Acres, Nobleton, Mountain Park, and Masaryktown. Platted in 1924 and surveyed by G.D. and H.D. Mendenhall, Garden Grove originally covered about 13,000 acres and was planned with more than 1,600 residential, commercial, and small farm lots, bounded by the Tampa Northern Railroad on the east and crossed on the west by part of State Road No. 5, later U.S. 41. Its design included a city square, a lakeside park, and a main street called Station Boulevard leading to the train depot. Newspaper advertisements promoted a holiday atmosphere and an idyllic setting as a newly affluent middle class sought quick profits through land speculation, while Hernando County built roads from Spring Lake and Aripeka, and bus and passenger train service connected the area to Tampa. By 1926 some roads had been laid out, several homes had been built, the Methodist-Episcopal Church South became the first house of worship, and a one-room school was established that operated until 1948. The speculative boom proved unsustainable, the real estate bubble burst in the mid-1920s as Garden Grove was just beginning to grow, some properties were sold back to their original owners for pennies on the dollar, the corporation became inactive in 1936, and development did not resume until the 1950s with new homes and roads and the Crum family’s donation of land for the Garden Grove Baptist Church.