By Paul Trembly from the Fall 2024 edition of Reflections Magazine
The year was 1872, and Washington Kilmer was dying. In poor health, barely able to walk and suffering a general physical breakdown, he was given, at most, a year to live. As he departed his physician’s office, he took the first steps of a journey that would come to have an impact on Central Florida.
Born April 5, 1838, in Schoharie County, New York, to Jonas and Hannah Kilmer (née Miller), Kilmer grew up in the rural fields of the Mohawk Valley working at his father’s sawmill. He was the youngest of 11 children, and his mother died within a year or so of his birth. His father went on to remarry, and Washington’s stepmother added two more children to the already large family.
After completing his early education in the local schools, he began his collegiate studies at the Schoharie Academy. He pursued medical training at Albany Medical College of Union University, graduating in 1860. While attending Albany Medical College, he lived with his cousins Chauncy and S. Andral Kilmer, who were also students at Union University. Andral Kilmer became a doctor in his own right and went on to create several patent medicines, including the then well-known Swamp-Root Kidney, Liver & Bladder Remedy.
Civil War surgeon
Washington Kilmer’s first job as a doctor was as resident physician of the City Infirmary of Albany, serving the nearly 1,200 inmates of what was then called an insane asylum and alms house. In 1861, with the onset of the Civil War, requests were made for volunteer physicians. Answering the call, Kilmer relocated to Alexandria, Virginia, where he took charge of the Grace Church Hospital. Three years later, he enlisted in the 16th Regiment of the Virginia Infantry as a surgeon and spent the remainder of the Civil War in and around Washington, D.C. At the close of the war, he found himself in the capital city itself, where he opened a practice and remained for another three years.
Around 1864, Kilmer relocated to Ironton, Ohio. During the five years he lived and worked in Ironton, he met Florence Davy, a descendant of the celebrated English chemist Sir Humphry Davy. The two fell in love and married in 1864 and, in time, were joined by two daughters: Alice, born in 1866, and May, born in 1870.
Life was good for the Kilmer family until 1872. Over the course of that fateful year, Washington Kilmer’s health began to deteriorate. Whether due to ailments or to his incessant labors as a physician, he suffered a general breakdown. Having been given up for dead by his medical colleagues, barely able to even walk, Kilmer made an astonishing decision. He would undertake a journey – a 1,500-mile journey – that would take him to Florida, and he would go on foot.
Map of Altamont from the State Archives of Florida
Walking to health
Having heard stories about the healing properties of Florida’s climate and natural springs, Kilmer secured a job with the Cincinnati Commercial as a correspondent and, leaving his family behind, began walking to explore and report back on the people of rural America. Traveling over the mountains of West Virginia, he passed through Wakalla, South Carolina, and continued down through Georgia and Florida, gathering strength and health. Eventually he ended up at what today is the intersection of State Road 434 and Markham Woods Road.
After a stay of a few months, his health fully restored, Kilmer returned home to Ohio, and later the following year, the Kilmer family set out for Florida, eventually locating on some 160 acres in the area that’s now between Interstate 4 and the Rolling Hills Country Club.
Kilmer found the area reminiscent of a village in his home state of New York, so he named this smattering of homes and farms Altamont (the final “E” would not be added until 1895, when the citrus-growing community would vanish after the devastation of the Great Freeze of 1894-1895).
Soon after settling down, Washington Kilmer planted one of the first orange groves in the area and spent the next several years cultivating citrus and enjoying pastoral life. Around 1875, he became part of the local grange, lecturing on agriculture and horticulture and eventually joining the Fruit Growers Association. As his children grew, he also became active in educational matters. For eight years (1877-1885), he served as chair of the newly formed Orange County School Board, helping to establish the school system and a teachers’ institute.
The county’s brick, Victorian-style courthouse, built in 1892, stood on what’s now Heritage Square Park, next to the History Center.
Accomplishments in Orlando
Around 1886, the Kilmer family relocated to Orlando, where Washington Kilmer restarted his medical practice, setting up shop at a location near the present-day History Center, on the street that would eventually come to bear his name – Washington Street.
In 1887, after a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Tampa, the call went out to nearby communities for physicians. Kilmer was the only one from Orange County to respond and spent the next five weeks treating the sick and dying. As he was preparing to go home, he himself was stricken and barely escaped death. After returning to Orlando, he was presented with a gold watch bearing this inscription: “Presented to Dr. Washington Kilmer by the citizens of Orlando in appreciation of his services in the Yellow Fever epidemic at Tampa, Fla., Nov. 25, 1887.”
For the next 15 years, Kilmer served as surgeon for both the Seaboard Railroad and the Florida Central & Peninsular Railroad, as well as continuing his private practice. During his time in Orange County, he was involved in the establishment of at least two of Orange County’s courthouses – the 1875 wood-frame courthouse built by Jacob Summerlin and the 1892 red-brick courthouse with its clock tower (a clock face from the tower is currently on display at the History Center, on the third floor).
Kilmer’s wife, Florence, died in December 1906. He continued to be involved with the community until his death in November 1919 – 47 years after being given up for dead by his colleagues in Ohio. He is buried alongside his wife in Orlando’s Greenwood Cemetery. His daughter Alice married Walter Clare in 1898 and moved to San Diego; the couple had no children. His younger daughter, May, never married and eventually moved to San Diego to be near her sister. In February 1957, the elderly sisters tragically died in a house fire. Both are interred at Greenwood with their parents.
Dr. Washington Kilmer was a remarkable man – not only for his determination in walking from Ohio to Florida but also in his desire to serve his community. During his nearly 45 years in Central Florida, he contributed to the advancement of citrus agriculture, played a part in forming what would become Orange County’s public school system, and risked his own health to attend to those suffering from an epidemic. He saw Orlando grow from a small collection of houses to a bustling city. Virtually unknown outside of his family, he is surely one of the unsung early settlers of Central Florida and Orange County.