Lake Wales Is Spelled Wrong (On Purpose)

Drive into Lake Wales and look at the signs.

The city is Lake Wales.

The lake in the middle of it is Lake Wailes.

Same lake. Same name. Different spelling.

It isn't a typo, and nobody forgot a letter.

Lake Wales dropped the "i" on purpose.

A Lake Named After A Surveyor

The story starts in 1879, long before there was a town.

A man named Sidney Irving Wailes was surveying the land along the Lake Wales Ridge.

One of the lakes out there was called Watts Lake.

Wailes changed the name. To his own.

From then on, it was Lake Wailes.

Pine Woods And Turpentine

For the next 30 years, there wasn't much around the lake.

It was mostly pine woods, and the pine was worth more as turpentine than as anything else.

In 1902, a man named G.V. Tillman saw something bigger. He looked at the land around Lake Wailes and pictured citrus, industry and a town.

By 1911 and 1912, the Lake Wales Land Company was planning one.

Its engineer, Allen Nydegger, and his crew camped on the shore of nearby Crystal Lake while they laid out the streets.

One early arrival wrote in her diary in 1912 that the train let her off at a platform used for loading barrels of turpentine.

The Name Problem

Here's where the spelling comes in.

The land company had a brand-new town to sell.

And the lake it was named after was spelled W-A-I-L-E-S.

According to the state historical marker, the town's founders worried the "i" gave the name "an overtone of distress." Local history credits Tillman with suggesting they drop it.

Wailes. Wails. Can you see it?

That's not the first thing you want people to think about when you're asking them to move to your town.

The Sign Changes

The fix came from the railroad.

In November 1913, a bigger passenger and freight depot replaced the little station.

Its sign didn't say Lake Wailes.

It said Lake Wales.

(Funny thing is, Wailes and Wales sound exactly the same. The change was only ever on paper.)

The Lake Wales History Museum gives a simpler version: the railroad changed the spelling on the depot sign to match how people were already writing it. Both can be true. By then, "Wales" had caught on.

When Lake Wales incorporated in May 1917, the new spelling became official.

And the town leaned all the way in. When Lake Wales built its big 1920s hotel downtown, it was called the Dixie Walesbilt.

The Lake Kept Its "i"

But nobody ever renamed the lake.

More than 110 years later, the town is Lake Wales and the lake is still Lake Wailes.

You can see both on the same sign at Lake Wailes Park, on North Lakeshore Boulevard.

The town's Pioneer Days festival is held right there every October. This year was its 50th.

And if you want to see where the trains came in, the 1928 Atlantic Coast Line depot that replaced the 1913 one is now the Lake Wales History Museum, at 325 South Scenic Highway.

So the next time someone tells you Lake Wales is spelled wrong, you can tell them it's actually the other way around.

The lake has it right. The town just didn't like how it looked.

Sources: Florida state historical marker (Lake Wales); Lake Wales History Museum; Lake Wales Historical Trail; Wikipedia, "Lake Wales, Florida" and "Lake Wales station"; Florida Back Roads Travel; State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.