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Fountainhead

#HistoryTuesday - Tuesday October 13TH 2026

It's Sebring's oldest and tallest high-rise, and it's been a fixture along Lake Jackson for nearly 60 years. You can see it from across the lake along U.S. 27. It's the perfect viewing spot for any activity and event on the lake - especially the fireworks on the 4TH Of July.

Fountainhead is located at 2131 Lakeview Drive at about the 2 o'clock position along the lake from north to south. The 12-story residential building was built in 1967 at a time when residents of the downtown area were slowly starting to move over to new neighborhoods on the other side of Lake Jackson to take advantage of direct U.S. 27 / U.S. 98 accessibility. (We previously wrote about the 1956 realignment of the two concurrent highways to the west side of Lake Jackson - bypassing downtown completely.)

Fountainhead was an attempt to attract the original part of Sebring and win back residents to the downtown area. Starting in the mid-to-late-1960 developers were building high-rise luxury apartment buildings along selected and appropriately zoned lakefronts along the Lake Wales Ridge. They were a success along beach towns, so why not lake towns as well ? The experiment was actually not very popular with local residents - here and elsewhere. They preferred an unobstructed lakeview with no tall buildings getting in the way.

Fountainhead was built so that you can live in luxury with a beautiful view of Lake Jackson, and then take a 10-minute stroll to our Circle for shopping, dining, and entertaining. It eventually transitioned from rental apartments to deeded resident-owned condominiums. 71 units comprise the 12-story building.

So how did Fountainhead get its name ? Remember the Gary Cooper / Patricia Neal movie "The Fountainhead" back in 1949 ? It was inspired by the popular Ayn Rand novel of 6 years earlier. Gary played Howard Roark - an architect who had creative visions for modern buildings soaring upward into the sky, but he kept battling with those who wanted traditional over modern. Fountainhead was a common name for modern buildings soaring upward into the skies all across the U.S.A. back in the 1960s and into the 1970s. And we got our own "one-and-done" Fountainhead as the "head" or crown of Lake Jackson.

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Featured Article: Fountainhead