A golf fairway in Central Florida is not a natural thing. Left alone for a single wet summer, that velvet green would go back to sandspur, palmetto and pine inside a season. Every inch of what makes Alaqua Lakes beautiful — the Fazio greens, the still lakes it was named for, the hedges behind the gate — is kept that way on purpose, against the pull of the Florida it was built on top of. And almost all of that upkeep, in the end, runs on electricity.
Which makes the place a quiet little experiment. Here is about as controlled an environment as money builds in Seminole County: gated, planned, manicured, climate-conditioned. The one thing nobody inside the gate can manufacture is the current that keeps it all running — and that arrives from somewhere else entirely, on a line of poles walking in through the woods.
Before it was a paradise, it was woods
The land here is the old Markham country, the piney stretch west of I-4 that gave Markham Woods Road its name — a route that once linked Longwood to a vanished little settlement called Markham. In the 1870s and 1880s this corner of Seminole County was orange groves, lumber mills and cattle. Settlers came to West Longwood, just up the road, because the sandy soil was good for citrus.
And then Florida did the thing Florida does. It reminded everyone who was actually in charge.
Over the winter of 1894 and 1895, two freezes a few weeks apart dropped down the peninsula and took the groves to the ground. Trees that had been loaded with fruit were bare sticks by February. Growers who thought they had tamed this place into neat rows of oranges learned that the warmth they were banking on was only on loan. The citrus boom that built towns like Longwood collapsed, and the industry crept south to start over where the cold couldn’t reach.
That is the older lesson buried under the fairways: you can lay whatever you like over this land, but Florida keeps a vote, and it tends to cast it on its own schedule.
The town they conjured out of the pines
A century after the freeze, a different kind of ambition arrived. In the late 1990s the developer Taylor Woodrow began building Alaqua Lakes — a gated, luxury community of custom and semi-custom homes wrapped around a brand-new Tom Fazio golf course, the Legacy Club, which opened in 1998. The houses went up in waves from 1998 into the 2010s, until there were something like five hundred of them behind the gate.
The lakes, like the greens, were an act of design. This is a place named for its water, and the water is shaped, held, and kept moving on purpose — the ponds that mirror the Fazio holes, the fountains that keep them from going stagnant in the heat. On a still evening it is genuinely lovely, and none of it is an accident.
It was, and is, a convincing version of control. Behind one gate you have your own golf, your own water, your own cooled and quiet streets — a pocket of Florida bent entirely to how its residents want it to look and feel.
The one thing you can’t landscape
Except the current. You can dig the lakes and shape the greens and raise the gate, but you cannot make your own electricity. It comes in from outside, along the utility lines that cross the same open country the groves once stood in — and everything that makes the place the place is downstream of those wires.
You can build a place to feel completely self-contained and still depend, utterly, on a line of poles marching in from the outside world.
In Central Florida that dependency has a season. Every summer the afternoon storms stack up into some of the tallest thunderheads in the country, and the lightning that comes with them finds the wires. Most years it is an hour’s flicker and nothing more. But every so often something far bigger comes up the peninsula to find out how much of that control was ever real.
2004: the summer the lights went out for good
It came in 2004. Hurricane Charley crossed the state in August and passed close enough to Seminole County to be, by local accounts, the strongest storm the area had on record — gusts clocked past 90 miles an hour, well inland, in a region that likes to think of itself as safe from that sort of thing.
And it didn’t come alone. Over the following six weeks, Frances and then Jeanne crossed the peninsula as well — three hurricanes in a season, a sequence people here still measure other years against. When the wind was done, the damage that mattered most to daily life was the same everywhere: the wires were on the ground.
Seminole County later put its own three-storm bill at roughly $54.9 million. And the dark lasted. In Altamonte Springs, the next town over, some neighborhoods had no power for as long as twelve days. A gated community’s greens do not stay green through twelve days without irrigation in August, and its air conditioning does not run on good planning.
There was nothing a resident could do about it but wait for a truck to reach their street. The most carefully controlled address in the county was, in that stretch, exactly as powerless as the oldest house on the oldest road — because they were both waiting on the same line down the same road.
2017: and then it happened again
If 2004 could be filed away as a freak season, Hurricane Irma reopened the file thirteen years later. In September 2017 Irma raked the length of the state and knocked out power to millions; the local utility called it the most significant storm ever to hit its Florida territory, touching all thirty-five counties it serves.
A week after Irma, around fifteen thousand homes in Seminole County were still without power. In one subdivision next door in Altamonte Springs, a resident was still dark about nine days in — while crews, by the utility’s own admission, were sometimes sent to the wrong neighborhoods, and some customers were told their power was back when it wasn’t. Being newer, nicer, or behind a gate bought nothing in that line. The grid doesn’t read the plat map.
The vote Florida keeps
Stand at the edge of one of those lakes on an ordinary evening — the fountain working, the green holding its color, the gate swinging shut behind the last car home — and Alaqua Lakes looks like a place that thought of everything. It very nearly did. The lakes, the greens, the gate, the cool air: all of it designed, built, and maintained exactly as intended, right up until the power stops.
That is the thread that ties the bare groves of 1894 to the dark streets of 2004 and 2017. A hundred years apart, the same quiet fact: you can lay a paradise over this corner of Florida, but you are renting the conditions that keep it one. The freeze took the fruit. The storms take the current. And the one input the whole beautiful place can’t manufacture for itself is the one Florida is most willing to switch off.
