When Hibbard pulled away from their Winnetka home, he turned south, taking the eastern portion of the Dixie Highway. Once February snow disappeared, his mind turned as quickly as the spoke wheels on his superbly crafted Pierce Arrow. His reputation was on the line with Welsbach. How could he judge on his own what Forbes could not after a tour led by businessmen and politicians who knew its challenges? If he did find proof of bust, how would he suggest the company position itself to lessen the impact? And there was Mel to consider. How could he do all that and keep his promise of a pleasant vacation to her if the rumors of a bust were true?

Before reaching Winter Park, Hibbard, Mel and little Hib stopped in Daytona Beach long enough to visit James Gamble Rogers II. Gamble had been a childhood friend of Mel's brother, Dan Leonard, in Winnetka, where the two boys had grown up. They roomed at Dartmouth for a while until Gamble's father became so ill his family had to move to Florida in 1915. Later, Gamble assumed responsibility for his father's architectural firm. Hibbard and the gifted young architect shared a love of sailing, but the next four decades would bring the two men much closer as friends and business partners, as well as nose-to-nose litigants.

From there, the half-day drive to Winter Park must have felt like nothing to Mel compared to how far they had traveled. After 3,500 miles, the words South Florida coming out of Hibbard's mouth probably grinded on her as much as potholed highway did. She would have asked him to curb his enthusiasm. They would be among the cultured and wealthy from frostbitten Northern cities, who came to shed their overcoats and galoshes in return for moderate temperatures, tropical surroundings, and elegant festivities in much less cumbersome attire. Most of all, she looked forward to the company and hospitality of her lively Aunt Mae.

Mary Leonard was a pioneer by temperament long before the Suffragette movement. At fifty-eight, she supported all the arts, but music was her vocation and avocation, particularly the violin. Not surprisingly, when she became a year-round resident of Winter Park in 1915, Rollins College became another passion. Mel shared her aunt's passion for music but varied widely in other views: specifically, Mel disliked the cold and detested the heat. Winter Park in February suited her perfectly.

The city made a profound impact on Hibbard, too, one that would later show itself in the not-so distant future. Its founders, Loring A. Chase, of Chicago, and Oliver E. Chapman, of Canton, Massachusetts laid out specific sites for a hotel, churches, schools, parks, and homes at its inception. When the Congregational Church members looked for a place in Florida to locate a new college, Winter Park's colonists boldly submitted a proposal. Of course, thirty miles away, the Orange City newspaper, South Florida Times, sneered at the notion, describing the burg as "A place surrounded by swamps, and about nine months out of the year, the hooting owls hoot to the families that will forever be the only inhabitants."

To boost Winter Park's chance of getting the college, Alfonzo Rollins, a Chicago businessman, added $50,000 ($1.1 million) of his own money to pad the town's bid of $144,180 ($3.2 million) in cash, stock, and land. Rollins' money talked - loudly - and the church closed the deal in 1885. The college, not coincidentally named Rollins College, proved to be a huge draw. Well-heeled Northerners started selling their winter homes in Jacksonville and St. Augustine and buying in the burgeoning little community of culture. More importantly, in years to come they would adopt the college as their own and generously, even lavishly, endow it. Hibbard would do everything in his power to bring quality education to his town. It was something he believed in, and Alfonzo Rollins had set a prime example of the benefits.

By 1920, there was still one real drawback. Though Mosquito County had long since changed its inhospitable name to Orange, the common fly plagued life in Winter Park. Flies ate mosquito larvae and were therefore good insects. Even so, the city's Board of Trade felt forced to take drastic action against this bane of social propriety. A bounty on the pesky insects of 15 cents ($1.77) per hundred flies - dead or alive - could be collected at the Town Hall during the winter season when Mel and Hibbard were there. However, the reward dropped to 10 cents ($1.18) per hundred during April, November, and December. Unfortunately, the hottest time of the year, when mosquitoes were plentiful but tourists were few, the price dropped to five cents (59 cents), and year-round residents pulled their swatters and paper fans out of the closet.

Even under such hardship, Winter Park continued to set a high-toned profile, as visitors and winter residents came to enjoy the money they made elsewhere. Aunt Mae had seen much of the town's transition from swampland to cultural center over her nine years there. Between 1923 and 1924, the town's growth doubled to 6,000 people. Building permits doubled. Deposits at the savings and loan doubled. Ecstasy doubled. Optimism doubled. Everything doubled.

When Winter Park became the second-most populous city in Orange County, civic leaders were almost giddy with excitement. Like children ogling licorice and penny candies at The Chocolate Shop on Park Avenue, they wanted even more construction than their ample budget could afford. To finance their spending spree, city leaders created millions of dollars in bond debt to build new water, sewer and lighting improvements, parks, and another school. While flying high, they annexed and paved miles of streets and sidewalks of the mostly uninhabited territory, figuring that if they built them, the people would certainly come and build homes.

Hibbard, a man who took speed limit and stop signs as mere suggestions, loved driving into outlying areas, especially ones that might benefit from Welsbach's lighting. Mel, however, probably had a few choice words for those bricks, locally called "cheap bone-busters." They were not fancy or smooth, but they could be laid quickly and provide efficient drainage. During the boom, those features mattered more than the comfort of motorists driving the streets. No one seemed to care much about whether there was a boom or bust in other parts of the state. The city's attitude was relentlessly upbeat: Growth would always be part of the landscape in Winter Park.

Growth and change suited Aunt Mae just fine. She had been an adventurous world traveler at a time when most women could not afford, for many reasons, to be such a free spirit. She ventured to remote areas few single women would go, including Europe and the Orient. Other Winter Park residents, however, were not as receptive. By 1926, most local residents disdained any intrusion along their oak-lined streets. To handle the increased traffic, the city had the "outrageous number" of sixteen stops signs. Winter Park Telephone Company rudely shed its cordial small town practices by warning customers, "Please do not expect the local operator to remember your name and number, and don't call for other subscribers by name." These modern encroachments, some felt, marred the otherwise idyllic winter season.

For Winter Park, that season began in January, when chauffeurs could be seen waiting at the train station to escort someone from a private Pullman car to a lavish estate, where a full staff of maids and cooks waited in crisply starched uniforms to cater to their every need. Other visitors motored in and stayed at one of the three fine hotels, at inns, or with friends. Aunt Mae invited Hibbard, Mel, and little Hib to stay at her home, with its sweeping view of Lake Osceola. As a patron of music and the arts, she probably filled their schedules with concerts and plays at Rollins College. Neighbors opened their elegant estates for parties and teas, and when they did, Hibbard and Mel were assured an invitation.

Thus, Hibbard and Mel would have been at ease at Winter Park's most elegant gatherings. Upon arriving, they would see the image of lush, flowering gardens reflected in the shine of superior motor cars. Hibbard would have been enticed with tidbits about Palm Beach architect Addison Mizner, whose Orlando office five miles away was so overflowing with work that he had recently opened an office in Winter Park. In addition, a local Seminole Indian Chief had sworn allegiance to the United States after his tribe's 100 years of war. Mel involved herself in rich conversations about fashion and social events, with women draped in silk, linen and chiffon dresses, and properly accessorized with matching-colored shoes and white gloves. Real estate, however, interested everyone. People often chatted about it in less formal settings, such as over dinners, noontime meals, or afternoon teas at one of several teahouses.

A short walk from Mae's home, Barron Hall complemented other homes along Lyman Avenue, with its delicate gingerbread trim and white frame construction. Although built as a private residence, Maude Barron, a former Deland school principal, had transformed the mansion's twenty-plus rooms into an inn only a few years earlier. Once she opened the doors, she made every guest feel as welcome as if they were a member of the Barron family. Well-known artists, educators, wealthy Northern industrialists, even visiting dignitaries called the inn their home. For special occasions, guests would ask Maude to reserve the lace tablecloth to adorn their table.

The evening Aunt Mae escorted the family to dinner at Barron Hall would leave an indelible impression on three-year-old Hib. Workers had been adding a screen porch wing to the popular inn, plus a new doorway and front porch stairs. As Mel walked up the steep steps, she admired the lush landscaping instead of watching her next move. At one turn, a loose board flipped and twisted, tossing her tall, elegant frame unfashionably to the ground, as if thrown by a wrestler.

No doubt, many of the ladies gathered around the prostrate Mel, forming a rainbow of protective colors. The men probably rushed to her aid. Likewise, Hibbard would have been there to comfort Mel and help his wife rise from the earth with as much grace as possible. Maude Barron must have rushed to Mel's aid, too, offering many sympathies. Rather than entertain the visions of lawsuits dancing in her head, she doubtless insisted on paying any medical bills. When Mel finally rose, she did so with a sore and bruised body. The doctor decreed the severity of her injuries, including a sprained ankle, prevented her riding another five hundred miles south to Coral Gables. He prescribed weeks of bed rest. After surviving the long jolting journey with a husband anxious to talk business and a squirmy child, Mel probably thought the fall was a favorable tradeoff.

Looking back, Mel's mishap seemed more like divine intervention. That year, life to the South was rancorous, even perilous. If Mel had seen what a good job of whitewashing the truth politicians in Tallahassee and South Florida had done, she would have made Hibbard's life pure agony. Public services, including sewers and electricity, staggered under the strains of a mushrooming population. Daytime heat reached into the eighties, while ice and fresh vegetables were practically nonexistent. Astonishingly, the shortages were so critical that the possibility of famine hovered. Anyone arriving in Florida without plans for housing would be lucky to find space to rent on someone's porch for the going rate of $24 ($281) a week.

Though the accident spared Mel and little Hib all those inconveniences, Hibbard had nothing he could report to Welsbach. Venturing south to see the situation on his own might have been an option, but he could not have taken his son along or left him for Aunt Mae to handle. She now had houseguests for longer than she expected and was not accustomed to having a curious little boy and her antique curio cabinets in the same room. While Hibbard's superiors at Welsbach were disappointed that he could not travel to South Florida, the necessity of the situation allowed Hibbard to stay several more weeks in the enchanted land of Winter Park of Winter Park.

While Mel pampered Hib and kept him close by, Aunt Mae decided the best thing for Hibbard's boundless energy was work. Her Episcopal Bishop had mentioned Altamonte Spring's burgeoning fernery business to him, saying that churches, especially the Catholic ones, used sprigs of the feathery green plant to adorn their altars each Sunday. Aunt Mae arranged for him to tour the outlying countryside, where he could see such ferneries and a real Florida boom in the making. That excursion embedded the seeds for his place in Florida history.

Hibbard's first introduction to the area he would call home for the next four decades could only be speculated. Aunt Mae probably introduced Hibbard to men at the Winter Park Land Company, the oldest and most influential real estate brokerage in the city. Land records show that the company was already doing quite a bit of business in Seminole County, especially in Altamonte Springs, a quiet yet prosperous town five miles to the northeast on the Dixie Highway. Hibbard would have driven through it on his way to Winter Park. Some people professed that more development potential rested in Seminole County than anywhere in Florida

Winter residents of Altamonte Springs knew about the area's potential, but they weren't telling many folks up North. They preferred to keep the idyllic qualities of their little town a secret. However, former New York Congressman Charles D. Haines loved to promote it. He and his wife Kathryn entertained fashionably and often, hosting locals and a Who's Who list of friends and dignitaries. Haines' guests could cruise Lake Orienta aboard his yacht, the "Kathryn," or take in a live performance at his private theater, the "Jasmine." The retired politician had another interest even more fascinating to him: what he called "catering to the esthetic sense of the nation."

Originally, his plan for bringing that idea to fruition manifested itself in 65 acres of lush asparagus plumosa ferns. Haines' guests would have marveled at what one reporter called, "The largest industry under one roof," Haines' Royal Fernery. The ferns grew in cypress slat houses, structures whose half-sun and half-shade design protected the delicate, yet thorny plants. When the feathery ferns achieved the proper size, workers cut and culled them for shipment across the United States by railroad. To support his enterprise, Haines and his partners had developed a self-sustaining company town. With "forty homes, a commissary, church, school, park and his Jasmine Theater movie house, the entire enterprise represented an investment of $500,000 ($5.5 million) in the mid-1920s."

Because of his social and political mixture of friends, the retired Congressman had encountered and adopted an altruistic view of the world. One friend with pacifist political views and a background as a promoter for Coral Gables, William Jennings Bryan, likely influenced Haines to commit his most benevolent act. Only weeks before Hibbard arrived in Winter Park, Haines and his wife Kathryn had announced their donation of the Jasmine Theater, a clubhouse, sixty-five acres of land, and $50,000 ($550,000) in cash to the International Press Association. "A unified press could establish and maintain peace," Haines told a Palm Beach audience." Because public opinion had launched the Great War, Haines hoped if peace might be preserved, and warlike sentiments reversed and replaced with a more peaceful outlook.

The men heading the International Press Association, former Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and Adolph Ochs, of The New York Times, were names known throughout the country - and they had big plans. The association agreed to create Press City, a retirement home designed for reporters from around the globe. Hearing that, Hibbard's heart must have pumped to near exhaustion: a new city where world-famous men would retire in comfort. As an interesting sidelight, the development would create a seemingly huge business opportunity. With Haines' ferneries scraped away from the earth by development, his fern customers would need a new source of supply. Who would that be?

Gordon J. Barnett already had that one figured out. Beneath his neatly combed brown hair, a broad forehead overshadowed his deep-set blue eyes. Just under six-feet tall, his slight, well-dressed frame, gave the appearance of a kind man. When a young woman broke his delicate heart, unrequited love bled over paper in the form of poetry.

Only the foolish would have found him to be weak-minded, however. This twenty-six year old clergyman's son was also shrewd and astute in business. He had ventured into his own fernery business in the early nineteen twenties. Once he associated himself with Haines and other commercial fern growers, he soaked up their knowledge in a comparatively short time.

As demand grew, Barnett enlarged his fernery, financing his efforts out of his own revenue. He marketed to a broad range of buyers around the country and Toronto and became well-known to some of the largest wholesale and retail florists. When their orders for ferns far outstripped what he could supply, he started buying ferns in bulk from nearby growers. The plans for Press City now presented Barnett with an opportunity to grab greater control of the market, but there was an even juicier bonus growing in the landscape outside of Altamonte Springs, and Barnett planned to harvest that one, too.

The local portion of Dixie Highway, laid hastily by the state years earlier, connected the East Coast portion of the original highway from Daytona into Central Florida. With the skyrocketing number of automobiles motoring across the road, its surface cracked like a dry riverbed. The highway crisscrossed the railroad tracks four times in the ten miles between Winter Park and Sanford, the Seminole County seat. Outside of a few towns, the land surrounding the railroad crossings had received only cursory tree clearing; thus, oncoming trains ambushed unsuspecting drivers and left them behind in a wake of damage, injury, and death. To remedy the problem, the state planned to build a new Dixie Highway to replace the old road. Barnett was poised to cash in on that move to the fullest.

Barnett's English-born parents, Augustus and Anna E. Barnett of Sarasota, Florida, had bought land from Haines adjacent to land owned by Anna E. Griffin. Two miles to the east, big money was coming into play. Lake Jessup Land Company sold land to build a horse track, the Seminole Jockey Club. Although pari-mutuel betting had become a popular pastime in Miami, the buyers probably looked to cash in when the state announced where the new Dixie Highway would be located, just as Barnett did. If it came near or through their property, their land values would soar.

When the state announced the pathway for the new stretch of Dixie Highway, Barnett won the jackpot. The new highway, labeled Highway 3, was to split a path straight between the Altamonte Springs and the Seminole Jockey Club, right along the eastern border of the land Barnett bought from Haines. In March, Barnett would sign over the right-of-way, the first step in the two-year construction project.

No one knows exactly how Hibbard and Gordon Barnett met, however, given the fortunate bonus that the state had bestowed on Barnett, surely every broker in Central Florida knew him. In turn, he probably took the opportunity to tell the brokers about how he planned to parlay the new road and the fernery business into a bigger bonanza. Until he did, however, his idea would not result in the mountain of dollars he anxiously anticipated.

When Hibbard listened to Barnett, he cupped his hand around left ear to catch each golden word, for they seemed not only prophetic but also plausible. Most people coming to Florida, Barnett explained, still wanted profit and pleasure, but wanted to invest only the slightest effort to obtain those the results. Like Haines, many well-heeled Winter Park residents were the ones who made things happen. He didn't want to entice them. They were already wealthy and actively engaged in other pursuits. They would not be satisfied with a quiet, idle life, and profits from a small fernery.

Instead, Barnett wanted to lure the people on the cusp of wealth. To fashion the bait, he designed a near-elitist atmosphere that blended a leisurely country atmosphere with the degree of city culture. He sweetened his bait with a glossy brochure full of flowery prose and the promise of easy money, words that Hibbard eagerly absorbed. Barnett explained how he had given up the maddening life of time clocks five years earlier. He wrote how he had been "lured by the indolent life of the tropics, abandoned the hurly-burly of New York City, and set his face southward. After drifting about the tropical islands of the Caribbean, he gravitated to Florida ... His good sense was almost immediately rewarded by his falling into a surprisingly profitable business, peculiar to Florida, and one which contained the very elements he had been seeking. He found a business unheard of in the North from which a livelihood could be obtained with the slightest effort..."

Hibbard could tell good marketing, if nothing else, and Barnett certainly drew a poetic picture.

"It is needless to say that a man of Mr. Barnett's artistic temperament would be as poor an agriculturalist as a ploughboy would be a banker; only a self-grown article such as tropical ferns, requiring neither cultivating nor replanting, could have intrigued his fancy. He could neither plow nor harrow, till nor spin, but he found profit and pleasure in this unique activity... Here at last was the way whereby men of creative mind, with knowledge of neither soil nor agricultural, and with absolutely no inclination toward `dirt farming' or physical labor, could find that basic essential to his leisure, essential to artistic opportunity - care-free self-support."

As Hibbard read on, Barnett laid on another touch of magic, saying he was carrying out a colonization plan dear to his heart. The word colonization made the effort sound historic, like founding the country, or at least Winnetka or Winter Park. Next came the gilded lure:

"There never has been a group of men and women more deserving of that precious leisure-time for accomplishment than the artists, writers, poets, thinkers, composers, litterateur - those who have a message for society which must be expressed - must be released from those pressing duties involved in the struggle for existence. There are many such dreamers of dreams, who yearn for artistic growth and expression. In fact, there are few men of creative temperament who, when freed from the struggle for existence, would not show hidden values undreamed of by all but themselves, yes, even unsuspected by their own friends and families." Barnett vowed to unleash them from the grindstone of necessity.

The Plan: Each individual fern estate would encompass slightly more than one acre of land. One-third of it would be covered with a slat house, including water pipes and sprinklers. Barnett Fern Company would handle the marketing and billing for this leisure business. The remaining land afforded ample room for a tropical bungalow, and garden, for growing a variety of tropical fruits, with enough room for a few hens and ducks for those who wished them... to "further aid in reducing the naturally low cost of tropical living." Paradise could be theirs for $5,000 ($55,000), payments for which, the brochure said, buyers could meet easily from the income their fernery produced.

Though Barnett had a prime location, a vision, and an industry designed to support his community, he still lacked an approved subdivision and an exclusive sales agent to attract prospective buyers while he ran the fernery. He needed the right man to see what he saw in the thicket of Seminole County: "Fern Park Estates: the Artists and Writers Colony of Florida."

Although anyone who came down from the North for Winter Park's social season brought unspoken credentials, Hibbard had held a marketing position in Hibbard Spencer Bartlett & Company and was currently a sales representative for Welsbach. Barnett's wish list was complete: From where he stood, Hibbard had money, experience, and connections to the elite.

When Gold was a young man, he would have laughed heartily the thought of having such words said about him. He had been well-liked by the town's people who traded at his father's store, but the idea of living in a grand city and reaching national acclaim would have been sheer folly. He ignored the coaxing of his family toward a serious future. When his father was forty-five, then the end of a man's average life expectancy, he asked Gold to help him repair the roof on the store. Again, Gold shirked off the task. Left to the job alone, his father climbed up the ladder and accidentally fell to his death.

Overcome with guilt, Gold felt that his inaction had played a part in his father's death. Added to this was the responsibility he faced as the sole support of his mother and sisters. From being careless and indifferent toward business, he plunged in with great energy and determination to wind up his father's affairs, move away and find substantial work.

At age twenty-five, he set out to cross the Great Lakes, with only three dollars in his pocket. He wanted to go west, as other young men did, but his destiny greeted him the moment he set foot in Chicago's muddy streets. Despite the horrific cholera epidemic and unsanitary water and sewer conditions, it held promise. The railroad system had finally reached the town and, with the completion of the new canal, it had access to the mighty Mississippi River. From there, goods could be transported to New Orleans, and then to anywhere in the world. Most everyone from civilized North who planned to travel into the western wilderness needed supplies. Chicago's location on the lakes and in the center of the country made it prime for a hardware enterprise. Gold found a job in a hardware store, slept in the back of it for several years, saved his money, and eventually formed his own business.

With energy, ambition, and steely-eyed focus crafted into him by his grandfather, Hibbard thought he could seize an opportunity when it came to him. It looked solid: a bulls-eye location on a new highway, a good plan, and a chance to mold the future of a community, as so many other men had done. However, he and Barnett had no way of knowing that for years, regulators in Florida, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. had been acutely aware of the deception and fraud in the Sunshine State. Yet, they repeatedly covered-up Florida's true financial condition through deceptive reports, federal bank bailouts, regulatory secrecy, and enough high-profile politicians, regulators, and businessmen woven into the loop to make it practically foolproof.