Feature | By Jocklyn Mundy | Photography by Windermere Photography
Five Generations in the Making
Loren "Andy" Williams' memories of growing up in Windermere begin with orange trees. Row after row of them surrounded his family's home on Lake Down, at the far southeast edge of town, covering land that would one day become Jennifer Lane and Lake Down Reserve. His friends all lived downtown, so his bike was his ticket to everything. "We were in town, but we weren't," he says with a smile.
Windermere Mayor Andy Williams
Most afternoons, the ride ended at Johnny's Country Store, the little hardware store on the 500 block. Tucked among the nails and hinges was a small section of fishing tackle, and for a boy with a lake at the end of nearly every street, it was the best aisle in town. There was no live bait, he remembers. Just lures, a handful of barefoot buddies, and the hope of a big bass breaking through the lily pads.
Today, Andy and his wife, Colleen, wake to that same view of Lake Down, from the very house where he grew up. His daughter, Loren, who is a senior at Olympia, sleeps in his childhood bedroom. His mother, Lavina, lives next door. And the boy who once pedaled in from the groves now serves as Windermere's mayor, the fifth generation of his family to call these lakes home.
Sight Unseen
In 1916, the McMurtrey and Rosser families packed up their lives outside Atlanta and moved to a small Florida town none of them had ever seen. They came together, grandparents, parents, and children, trusting that whatever waited at the end of the road would be worth it. As the family tells it, they paid five hundred dollars and settled the seller's grocery bill for twenty acres running from Ridgewood all the way down to the boat ramp. They planted oranges, and they put down roots that have never let go.
1st House in Windermere
John and Amelia McMurtrey were among Windermere's earliest settlers and opened a store on Main Street, a building that was later moved to Lake Butler and turned into a cottage. Their story holds a tender chapter, too. When their daughter Emma died giving birth in 1899, John and Amelia took in her newborn, Marcelle, and raised her as their own. She grew up alongside her aunts as a sister, loved and never without a home.
Around 1922, Marcelle's husband, John Wesley Rosser, and her grandfather built the first family house beside Lake Down. There was no plumbing and no electricity until after World War II. Water came straight from the lake.
Andy's grandmother, Mildred, grew up in that house, and in her written memories she described summer evenings. Her father came home from the groves at five o'clock, supper followed soon after, and then the whole family went down to the water to play. Baths were taken in the lake. Some days the laundry was, too. Each February, she and her mother walked to Lake Blanche to gather wild violets on land that is now Isleworth.
Mildred and Judy Williams
Life on the edge of the wilderness was not for everyone. Marcelle refused to walk into town for fear of the wild cattle, panthers, and bears that roamed the woods.
"They just got here," Andy says, "and never left."
McMurtrey Store on Main Street
A Name Handed Down
Andy carries more than his grandfather's name. He carries his nickname, too. Loren Robertson Williams was dubbed "Andy" by his father-in-law, who thought the young man bore a striking resemblance to Andy Gump, a popular comic strip character of the 1920s.
L.R. Williams served with the Seabees in the South Pacific during World War II. When he came home, he taught construction, built houses throughout Winter Garden, led the local Boy Scouts, and gave his time to Windermere as a council member, building inspector, and, in the early 1950s, mayor. In those same years, Mildred served as town clerk.
In 1960, L.R. died suddenly of a stroke. Mildred was left with three children in junior high and high school and a life to rebuild, and she met that moment with resilience. She went into real estate, and her very first sale was the entire Sunset Bay peninsula, for roughly $100,000.
Andy was too young to remember his grandmother, Mildred, selling houses. Her gift for real estate would surface again two generations later. Today, he is the co-founder of Lakeside Realty in Windermere, in the very building where his father opened his first machine shop, and one of the town's most prominent Realtors, even as he serves as its mayor.
Taking that office, more than seventy years after his grandfather held the same seat, turned Andy's thoughts to family. "I hope he's looking down on me, and same with my grandmother, my father, and that I'm making [them] proud," he says.
Bob and Lavina
Andy's father, Bob, grew up on Oakdale Street along Lake Bessie, a few doors from the town's postmaster, in the days when everybody knew everybody. John Mills Nabers, who still resides on Lake Bessie, was a boyhood friend of Bob's older brother, Larry, and he remembers the neighborhood kids crowding into the Williams house. The reason was simple. In the early 1950s, few homes had a television. "They had a TV," John told Andy.
Bob's boyhood reads like an adventure story. He and his friends rode horses through town. When he needed spending money, Bob let some air out of his Model A Ford's tires, set it on the railroad tracks, and followed the rails out to what would become Bay Hill, hunting deer, quail, and rabbits to sell along the way.
Lavina came to Central Florida from Texas in the early 1960s, when her father, a metallurgist, took a job with Martin Marietta. She met Bob at Lakeview High School in Winter Garden. They dated, broke up, and found their way back to each other, graduating in 1965 and marrying in 1968. As newlyweds, they made their first home in the small downtown building where Dixie Cream is today, and more than fifty years later, Lavina can stand inside and smile. "This was my living room," she says.
In the early 1970s, Bob opened a machine shop that remanufactured engine parts for Volkswagens and other imports. He worked six days a week, leaving at six in the morning and coming home at six at night. In time, he and Lavina invested in commercial property, including downtown buildings the family still owns.
Lavina has worked Windermere's elections for more than three decades. Since Bob's passing in 2022, her friends have gathered close around her, and three mornings a week they share breakfast in town.
A Boy on the Edge of Town
Andy was born in 1973 and grew up in the middle of three family homes, with his great-grandparents, John and Marcelle Rosser, on one side and his grandmother and her second husband, Bud Grice, on the other. Four generations lived within shouting distance, and the dirt roads and groves between them were his to roam.
Rosser Road
The Windermere of the 1980s moved at an easy pace. Oswald's had a pharmacy, and a flower shop sat downtown. The ball field sat where the library is now, and a home run was anything that cleared Forest Street. When Andy was old enough to take the boat out, his grandmother drove him to the Rikers' Chevron station at Sixth Avenue and Main Street, where Magnifica is today, for five dollars' worth of gas, enough for another week of adventures. By four o'clock, the whole town closed up for the day.
You've got to be involved if you want things to change, or stay the way you want them. — Mayor Andy Williams
After graduating from Florida Southern College in Lakeland, he came home to run his father's machine shop and later sold it to one of its employees. He has lived in other places over the years. None of them ever felt like home.
Lakeside Realty, Formerly R Williams Machine Shop and Auto Repair
A Steward's Heart
For more than thirty years, downtown Windermere barely changed. "From the mid-'80s to 2020, we didn't build anything new in town," Andy recalls. "Nothing was built. Nothing was torn down." About twenty years ago, when the town added its roundabouts and bricked Main Street, Andy and his father were part of those conversations as downtown property owners.
In 2018, Andy ran for town council because he wanted to do his part. He spent eight years on the council, including time as mayor pro tem, and helped the town celebrate its hundredth birthday as a member of the Centennial Committee. Along the way, he watched downtown come back to life. Windermere Brewing gave neighbors a place to gather in the evenings, and new shops followed. "That's what I'm most proud of," he says, "when we turned that corner."
When Mayor Jim O'Brien decided to step down, Andy offered to step up, and in March he took office. His invitation is simple. "This town's home. I'm not going anywhere," he says. "You've got to be involved if you want things to change, or stay the way you want them. You've got to be a good steward."
4 Generations
Ask about his favorite moments, and he lights up. The Fourth of July Pancake Breakfast always fills Town Hall with grandparents, children, and grandchildren until the crowd spills outside. "It's like a reunion," he says. This year, volunteers served more than seven hundred people and went through thirty gallons of batter. "We had a ball," he says.
L-R: Lavina Williams, Mandy David, Chris Andert, C.T. Allen, Molly Rose, Jerry Fay, Colleen Williams, and Mayor Andy Williams.
The Steps on Rosser Road
Much of the old Windermere has given way to the new. The groves are gone, replaced by homes. But the three houses on Rosser Road stand where they always have. "When your roots are here, everything is important," Andy says. "From how Main Street looks to our traffic issues, everything becomes personal."
Stewardship, for the Williams family, has never been about a title. It was Mildred keeping the town's records, L.R. building homes for his neighbors, Bob and Lavina investing in a downtown that hadn't changed in decades, and Lavina, all these years later, still working the polls. More than a century after his family arrived sight unseen, Andy carries that care from the closing table at Lakeside Realty to every council meeting, every pancake breakfast, and every conversation on Main Street. He looks after Windermere the way his family always has, putting neighbors first.
The boy who once pedaled in from the groves now helps families find their way home in Windermere and leads the town with patience and a deep affection for the neighbors he serves.
