Epoxy

Lake June in Winter

Lake Placid, Florida, USA

Also known as Lake June, Lake Stearns, Lake Placid, Highlands County

The man who organized the world's libraries also renamed this town.

Melvil Dewey built the Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks in the 1890s and wanted a southern version of it. In 1927 he bought land here, in a town then called Lake Stearns, and put the name of his New York club to the commissioners. They agreed in April, the state legislature signed off, and on 6 June 1927 the place was chartered as Lake Placid. The two towns are now formally sister cities.

Dewey's resort did not survive the crash of 1929. He died two years after that, and what the town became instead was agricultural. Growers brought caladium tubers up from the Amazon in the 1920s and found they did well in the black muck along the lakeshores here. Lake Placid now supplies most of the world's caladium bulbs, and the figure gets quoted anywhere from 80 to 98 percent.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: June 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Lake June in Winter map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, inset, with a black border groove running the perimeter.

Lake June in Winter is a wide open body with a smaller arm reaching east, which makes it one of the more straightforward dam runs in this batch. Most of the shoreline is long smooth curve rather than fingers and inlets. The work concentrates at the eastern end, where the lake pinches to a narrow neck before opening into a second smaller basin, and there the two dam lines come close enough together to be most of the channel.

Two colours, the water and the black. The black does the border, the lettering and the compass rose. The rose is a syringe fill, since those points and the outer ring have outlines too fine to dam.