Named for a soldier, or maybe Shakespeare
Nobody is certain who Orlando was. The city is variously said to be named for a soldier killed near Lake Eola in 1835, for a settler called Orlando Rees, or for the lovestruck hero of Shakespeare's As You Like It, championed by a judge who liked the play — the record is thin enough that all three survive. For most of its history it was a quiet citrus and cattle town, until Walt Disney World rewrote its identity in 1971. Disney assembled the land in secret through shell companies to keep prices down, acquiring an area twice the size of Manhattan before anyone knew who was buying. The tourist corridor along International Drive is its own parallel universe. The city proper is one of the most genuinely multicultural places in the South.
