Visiting Lake Placid

On Saturday morning, we had a meeting with the other SOWER couples who are here at Lake Placid for the month of February. We heard during the meeting that there were a couple of things going on in the town of Lake Placid on Saturday, so we drove into town to check it out.

We first stopped at the Farmer's Market -- it is held every Saturday...

There were a few stalls with fresh fruits and vegetables, and then other vendors selling other types of things.

One of Lake Placid's nicknames is "Town of Murals". I think I read that there are 47 murals painted on various buildings around town.

The first weekend we were in Lake Placid happened to be the time of the Lake Placid Country Fair, their 57th anniversary!

There were stalls set up all around Devane Park, or "the Circle" in town.

This was an interesting shop - selling banks using old postal box doors...

... they were neat looking...

... unique!

Just at the corner before we got to Devane Park was the American Clown Museum & School. We saw quite a few folks dressed up as clowns in the Country Fair.

There was a Chick-fil-A food truck at the fair too - we haven't ever seen one of those before!

Another mural in town - the train painted in the mural looks like it is coming out onto the tracks built out from the wall!

Information on the mural

The train depot

Prior to coming here, when we would tell folks that we were heading south in Florida to Lake Placid, they would give us quizzical looks and say, "Isn't that in New York?"

It turns out that Melvil (or Melville) Dewey (of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification) came down to Florida from Lake Placid, New York, and purchased a few thousand (3000?) acres of land in central Florida, where Lake Stearns was located. He petitioned to have the name of the lake changed to Lake Placid, and then also requested that the name of the town be changed to Lake Placid. He had founded the Lake Placid Club in New York, and they now had a southern location as well.

From what I read in Wikipedia, Dewey was also a proponent of spelling reform. 

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvil_Dewey):

As a young adult he advocated spelling reform; he changed his name from the usual "Melville" to "Melvil", without redundant letters, and for a time changed his surname to "Dui."

....

His theories of spelling reform (to which end he founded the Spelling Reform Association in 1886) found some local success at Lake Placid: there is an "Adirondak Loj" in the area, and dinner menus of the club used his reformed spelling. A September 1927 menu is headed "Simpler spelin" and features dishes like hadok, poted beef with noodls, parsli or masht potato, butr, steamd rys, letis, and ys cream. It also advises guests that "All shud see the butiful after-glo on mountains to the east just before sunset. Fyn vu from Golfhous porch."

From other things in the article, it sounds as if he was quite a character and maybe not the nicest person to know.