It can't be any older than 1890. Before that Lake Park was known as Twin Lakes. I think it dates between the late 1890s and about 1920.
By 1890 the hamlet previously dubbed Twin Lakes officially became Lake Park. That same year the black population celebrated the newly built Francis Lake AME Baptist Church. A more modern church was built in 1899 on a new plot of land, its site today.
With the dawning of the fresh 20th Century Lake Park was humming. Industry included the Palmer Brothers’ Turpentine Still and Ewell brown’s Lake Park Manufacturing Company, which ginned cotton. Residents operated merchandise stores, a livery stable, law offices and a drug store. Peat moss was harvested from local wetlands and sold to horticultural interests. And a Lake Park Spanish Moss factory thrived as strands of the plentiful, silvery air plant became as popular as horsehair for stuffing upholstered furniture.
But “stuffy” certainly could not be used to describe the Lake Park Ocean Road Hunting and Fishing Club, established in 1903. So popular was the club that it remodeled in 1909 adding a dining room, and garnered a widespread reputation of serving the tastiest fried chicken anywhere. A 1913 bathhouse plus a dozen rooms later, and the club emerged as the trendy haunt of area young people, who scooted to an evening’s entertainment in “new fangled” automobiles.
Other ventures were not as fortunate. Like much of the south in 1915, Lake Park agriculture depended heavily on cotton. But in 1915 the boll weevil struck, and the area’s crop would not recover until the 1980s.
