Ethel
A former settlement in Sorrento, Florida, Ethel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Former community within present Rock Springs Run State Reserve. The archive files it under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Ethel haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Ethel was never a town in the platted sense — it was a post–Civil War homestead community that gathered in the woods west of the Wekiva, in what is now Rock Springs Run State Reserve near Sorrento. William and Charlotte Moore arrived from Georgia in the late 1860s and are counted among its first settlers; other families followed under the Homestead Act, including veterans who used their enlistment bounties to buy land — among them formerly enslaved men freed by the war. The Orange County Regional History Center's account describes a scattered farm community of row crops and citrus, with carpenters, machinists, ferry operators, and schoolteachers in the census beside the farmers.
The settlement took its modern name when the Sanford and Lake Eustis Railway came through in 1886–87; it had earlier been known as Moody, a railroad stop. A commissary, a school that doubled as a church, and a post office gave it the shape of a community even without a plat.
What remains
The decline was agricultural before it was anything else: the great freeze of the mid-1890s killed young citrus across the district, and by 1920 only a handful of homesteads were still occupied. What survives is Ethel Cemetery, established around 1880 at the corner of the Moore homestead — identified by Florida State Parks as the oldest known cemetery in Lake County — where research has documented twenty-nine burials beneath a few remaining stones. The graves were nearly lost until a park volunteer found a Moore headstone in chest-high grass in 2008, a discovery that started the decade of volunteer research that put Ethel back on the map. The reserve's interpretive trail now walks visitors through what is left.
Documented history
The regional history museum identifies Ethel as a post-Civil War settlement now within Rock Springs Run State Reserve. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Rediscovering Ethel'. The record keeps it — history, not lore.
Verified historyOrange County Regional History Center
Sources on file
- 01Lake County historic settlements: township, range and sectionKinseekers Genealogical Society of Lake County, Florida · historical society · A2
- 02Rediscovering EthelOrange County Regional History Center · museum · A2
Field notes & open questions
Museum page full text blocked; indexed excerpts only. Lake County index gives Township 19 South, Range 29 East, Section 30. Research cemetery and precise settlement boundary separately.