A large time machine sits smack dab in the middle of Ocoee, right next to City Hall.
But it has no whirling dials or gleaming gizmos like something out of Back to the Future.
Instead, there’s a sprawling porch, a garden of antique roses and a 100-year-old camphor tree guarding the entrance.
It’s the Withers-Maguire House, where visitors can transport themselves into Florida’s past.
The big Victorian house overlooking Starke Lake has been open to the public for a year and a half now, giving its curator, Nancy Maguire, and other members of the Ocoee Historical Commission a chance to catch their breath after an arduous 12-year drive to restore the house.
Now they can enjoy welcoming others to the house as a gateway to a simpler time.
“The schoolchildren who come here are fascinated by the way life used to be,” Maguire said. “I tell them that this was a world with no television, no video games.”
In a state where “historic” may mean the early 1950s, the Withers-Maguire House boasts a long and impressive pedigree.
Now owned by the city of Ocoee, it was built in 1888 by William Temple Withers, a distinguished military officer, planter and Kentucky horse breeder who decided to try Florida winters for his health.
The Withers family also built the picturesque 1891 Ocoee Christian Church, just a few blocks from their home. Both buildings are now listed on the National Register of Historic places.
In 1910, the house was purchased for $5,000 by David and Maggie Maguire, pioneering west Orange County educators who had moved to the area from Georgia.
The Maguires seem to have fostered a love of learning that has passed through generations. Maggie Maguire was principal of Ocoee School from 1900 to 1904.
Her daughter, Lillian, who lived in the house from 1953 until her death in 1979, taught English at the University of Florida.
And Nancy Maguire, Lillian’s great-niece and the house’s curator, teaches gifted students at the Magnolia School in Orlando.
Hundreds of visitors have toured the house since it opened in January 1997, said Rebecca Layman, president of the Ocoee Historical Commission. They have come from as far away as Norway and as close as practically around the corner.
Visitors’ interests and questions vary greatly, said commission member Betty Ervine, who, like Layman, guides tours through the house and was instrumental in its restoration.
Modern Florida homeowners likely are envious of the hardy heart-pine floors and woodwork.
The heart pine “is so hard you can’t drive a nail into it,” said Harold Maguire, Nancy’s father and a former Ocoee mayor. “You have to drill a hole first.”
More important, termites can’t penetrate. “They’d have to be bionic,” Nancy Maguire said.
That splendid woodwork shines especially in the main rooms of the house, furnished as they might have been around 1910, but the house offers rich opportunities for time travel to other periods, as well.
In the entrance area, Ocoee residents can revisit a table and chairs from Pound’s Pharmacy, once a center of town life.
The glass-topped table shows off vintage jewelry from the days when girls in circle skirts and starchy crinolines nestled into the chairs around it.
Upstairs, a hatbox from Ivey’s department store offers a reminder of the days when a shopping trip to downtown Orlando was an all-day excursion, beginning with an auto trip down a two-lane State Road 50.
In two separate kitchens, visitors get a taste of household life as it was both around 1910 (pie safe, icebox with real ice) and during World War II.
The 1940s kitchen features food-rationing stamps, colorful original Fiesta dinnerware, local newspapers (“Nazi Blitz,” a headline blares) and letters Harold Maguire wrote home while he was flying missions across Europe for the Army Air Corps.
“We want to give visitors a sense of what life was like and that we were part of it, even in a small town like Ocoee,” Nancy Maguire said.
With their time machine up and running, Maguire and other Ocoee Historical Commission members don’t plan to rest on their laurels. They’ll be adding important furnishings to the house, such as a cast-iron stove for the 1910 kitchen.
Broader goals include gaining a national multiple-property historic designation for Ocoee, which would make it easier for properties to get grants to support historic restoration.
To help raise money and let more people know about the house, the commission has slated a busy schedule of fall and winter activities.
The house will be open for Ocoee Founders’ Day on Oct. 17, and the annual fall arts and crafts festival is set for Nov. 26.
Commission members have designed a woven coverlet featuring images of Ocoee historic sites that will be on sale, as well. And an open house on Dec. 12 and 13 will show off the house in period holiday decorations for the first time.
“The city of Ocoee has been very interested in preserving the past while at the same time moving forward,” Layman said. “It’s a town that’s rich in Florida history: in the beginnings of farming and the citrus industry, and in many of the elements that made a community distinctively Floridian. We see a real opportunity for this area to shine by offering a pathway to the past.”
