States: Florida
Start near: Orlando (about 25 min to Kissimmee) · Tampa (about 1 h 40 min to Kissimmee)
Orlando before the Mouse
Old Dixie: Cassadaga to Kissimmee is a ~75-mile back-roads route from Cassadaga to Kissimmee on US 17-92, driven in 1 day, that stays off I-4 through the Florida Peninsula.
US 17-92 is the old Dixie Highway spine through the middle of Florida, and it remembers everything I-4 paved over: a Spiritualist camp town where mediums post office hours, the celery empire that built Sanford, the oldest incorporated Black municipality in America and its most famous daughter, Zora Neale Hurston, and the greatest Tiffany glass hoard on earth. It ends at a monument literally built from the states, in the town the Mouse made a suburb.
📍 Eatonville's historic markers and Sanford's downtown district plaques do heavy lifting on a short route.
A morning with the mediums, then Sanford's brick downtown, the town celery built and the ferry-and-rail hub before Orlando mattered.
Founded 1894 and still run by certified mediums; the 'Psychic Capital of the World' is a whole town of readings, seances and a haunted hotel. Skeptics welcome, allegedly expected.
'Celery City': a brick 1880s downtown on Lake Monroe built by Henry Sanford's farm empire, now breweries and antique rooms. The zoo began with a rhesus monkey traded for produce.
Maitland's art colony, Eatonville's living history, Winter Park's Tiffany trove, and the old motel-row 17-92 into Orlando.
Eatonville incorporated in 1887 as America's first all-Black municipality, and raised the woman who wrote it into the canon. The Zora! Festival takes over every January.
The most comprehensive Tiffany collection in existence, including the chapel he built for the 1893 Chicago world's fair, reassembled here piece by leaded-glass piece.
The pre-Disney tourist strip, ending at Kissimmee's courthouse square and the strangest patriotic monument in the South.
The swan boats and 1920s skyline of the citrus-money city that existed before 1971. Orlando was a real place; downtown still is.
A 50-foot 1943 pylon of stones donated from every state, built to prove wartime tourists still mattered. Folk-art patriotism at its most concrete.
Old Dixie: Cassadaga to Kissimmee is about 75 miles and takes 1 day at a back-roads pace.
It runs from Cassadaga to Kissimmee.
It follows US 17-92.
It avoids I-4, using US 17-92 instead.
6 stops are mapped, including Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, Historic Sanford Riverfront, Zora Neale Hurston Museum, Morse Museum and Lake Eola & old Orlando.
Florida's Mystic Coast (3 days).
The atlas’s seasonal note for this route: “The Zora! Festival (late January) is the right week for Eatonville, and the wrong week to find a room.”
Florida's Mystic Coast (3 days)
Connects with: A1A: Flagler's Coast · The Space & Treasure Coast · Cross Creek & the Springs
More in the Florida Peninsula: A1A: Flagler's Coast · The Space & Treasure Coast · Cross Creek & the Springs · The Nature Coast · The Florida Cracker Trail · The Big Water · The Tamiami Trail · The Overseas Highway · US 41: The Tamiami Trail North, Tampa to Naples