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The area known today as Lake Placid,
Florida was opened up for homesteading in 1909, and by 1926 tourists had found the town of "Lake Stearns".
In 1927 Dr. Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System for cataloging library books, arrived in town. He found
the area strikingly similar to his native Lake Placid, N.Y., due to the many lakes. Dewey built several hotels and saw
them as the semitropical branch of his Lake Placid Club in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. At Dewey's urging,
the name Lake Stearns was changed to Lake Placid in 1927.
In the early 1940's Highway 27 was begun and was finished in
the early 1950's. The few hundred people living in Lake Placid in 1928 has grown to the present population of several
thousand, no doubt due to it's rolling hills, beautiful lakes, and near perfect climate!
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