Bok Tower Gardens in Polk County, Florida

Photograph: Bok Tower at Work.jpg by Milesb1217 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Polk County attraction

Bok Tower Gardens

Polk County · Central Florida

A 205-foot marble bell tower on one of peninsular Florida's highest points, set in gardens laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

QUESTIONS THAT NAME THIS PLACE

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

Edward Bok edited the Ladies Home Journal. He and his wife Mary Louise Curtis Bok spent a winter near the Lake Wales Ridge in 1921 and decided to turn what he called an arid sandhill into something else entirely. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed the landscape between 1924 and 1928, putting in a thousand live oaks, ten thousand azaleas and a great deal besides, on ground 295 feet above sea level, which is high country by Florida standards. Milton B. Medary designed the Singing Tower, built between 1927 and 1929 in pink Etowah and gray Creole marble, and President Calvin Coolidge dedicated it on February 1, 1929. Sixty bells cast by John Taylor and Company of England hang on the eighth floor, played daily from a keyboard by a carillonneur. The sanctuary covers 250 acres. Pinewood Estate, a Mediterranean Revival house built between 1930 and 1932, stands on the grounds and is listed separately. The tower became a National Historic Landmark in 1993

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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