Surveyors worked in harsh conditions—cutting through swamps, marking trees, and enduring storms and disease. Their field notes, now preserved in archives, describe a land of “pine barren and hammock,” with “many small lakes and streams of good water.”
The surveys of the early 1830s laid the groundwork for the establishment of future towns. When the war ended in the 1840s, these maps guided returning settlers and land speculators. The location of Orlando, for example, later corresponded with a high ridge between lakes, noted in early survey records for its “healthy air and good water.”
The Birth of Orange County
In 1845, Florida became the twenty-seventh state of the Union. Two years later, in 1847, the territorial name Mosquito County was officially changed to Orange County—a reflection of both rebranding and aspiration. The new name symbolized agricultural promise: citrus cultivation had begun to spread across Central Florida, and settlers wanted to shed the negative associations of “Mosquito.”
The county seat was later established at Orlando, a small settlement known initially as Jernigan, after the Jernigan family who had settled there in the 1840s. From this modest beginning grew the modern city that would become Central Florida’s hub.
Although this transformation occurred more than a decade after 1834, it was that earlier year’s combination of conflict, mapping, and settlement that laid the foundation for it. The frontier of 1834 became, in time, the heartland of Orange County’s identity. shutdown123