Oviedo

Oviedo. . , In the late 1860's Confederate veterans and freed slaves from the war-devastated South began to move into the settlement called "the Lake Jesup Community," to be joined later by others from Northern states and from Sweden. One of the Swedish immigrants, Andrew Aulin, appointed postmaster in 1879, named the new post office "Oviedo" after the city in northern Spain. , About 1870 Dr. Henry Foster from New York hired local men to plant citrus groves on the shores of Lake Charm and Lake Jesup. After the great freeze of 1895 farmers began to grow celery, first in Oviedo and later in the rich muck of Black Hammock on the south shore of Lake Jesup. The two crops, citrus and celery, became the mainstays of Oviedo agriculture for many years, with celery production reaching a peak in the 1940's. , Oviedo can claim many contributions to Florida agriculture, among them introducing the Temple Orange into Florida about 1900, when Butler Boston, a local nurseryman, budded the Jamaica Orange in the groves of J.H. Lee and others. , Hunting and fishing in early Oviedo centered on "the creek" , Econlockhatchee , and "the river" , St. John's. Transportation was by boat on the river, until the Plant System railroad (Atlantic Coast Line), now the Cross-Seminole Trail, reached here in 1886, and the FC&P (Florida, Central, and Peninsular), nicknamed the "Friends Come and Push" and later the "Dinky Line", connected to Winter Park in 1894. , Oviedo was a community of 500 when Seminole County was carved out of Orange County in 1913, but had grown to 800 when it incorporated in 1925. Today Oviedo is home to thousands and a crossroads for the old and the new.