At its start, Bok Tower might have become just another 1930s Florida roadside attraction in Depression-era America.
But it quickly became so much more than the other tourist stops nearby. No, it would not be like the pyramids of athletic youth on water skis waving from a lake or the squawky parrots in a make-believe jungle.
Bok Tower combined stunning architecture with fine music and a landscape organized into natural art by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who famously helped design the gardens at Biltmore House in North Carolina.
The vision for building this unlikely marble carillon bell tower in the scrubland hills of Central Florida came from a Dutch immigrant turned American Pulitzer Prize winner.
He was a man at the forefront of the nation’s first women’s progressive movement, which he helped shape as editor of the world’s first million-selling magazine, the Ladies Home Journal.
During winter visits, Edward William Bok first became enamored of the vistas atop one of Florida’s highest points of land, called Iron Mountain by locals who saw its 295-foot crest as a breathtaking height.
Bok purchased the land and soon brought Olmsted in to begin reshaping its sparse pine barrens into a lush garden that took full advantage of the tropical location south of the winter frost line.
Truckloads of black top soil were brought in to cover the infertile red sands of the Lake Wales Ridge. Olmsted built ponds on the hilltop to reflect the gothic beauty of a 205-foot carillon tower pieced together from pink and grey marble.
Huge bells were hoisted high above the citrus groves and then hidden behind cutouts of pastel natural rock carved in Art Deco shapes and placed in the tower’s windows.
The carillon is one of the world’s outstanding collections of bells, 60 in all, used to give outdoor music concerts. Bok’s bravado was in believing that, if he built his tower in a remote ridge of rural orange groves, people would actually come to hear the bells play.
And he was right. More than 23 million visitors have come to listen since Bok Tower was presented to the American people in 1929 as a gift accepted by then-President Calvin Coolidge.
Sunday, Jim and I were moved by the concert of patriotic music and Americana played on the mountain top by renowned carillonneur Geert D’Hollander, whom we met afterward.
We sat in rows of chairs arranged under the trees in front of a closed-circuit video screen showing D’Hollander playing his clavier inside the bell tower.
Immediately behind the screen stood the carillon tower itself as its bells rang out the Battle Hymn of the Republic and a medley of Stephen Foster songs. It was a beautiful day and a poignant celebration of the centennial of Armistice Day at the end of World War I.
Robert Craig Waters 