The lobby of the Clewiston Inn in Clewiston, Florida. The Inn is a restored classical revival building located in the heart of sugar cane country. It is near Lake Okeechobee roughly midway between West Palm Beach and Ft. Myers.
The official tagline for Clewiston is “America’s sweetest town” because the town of about 7,000 is in the heart of Florida’s sugar industry. The U. S. Sugar Corporation is now the nation’s largest producer of raw and refine cane sugar and one of the nation’s premier producers of oranges and orange juice products. (It also is one of the largest air polluters in the country and I can attest to that when the tilled sugar stalks are burned periodically producing course black dust over everything in its path. Thankfully, these burns do not often bother us). Clewiston is the largest of the communities in Hendry county (named for an early settler).
The Inn is quite comfortable (compared with the surrounding fast food joints, speed traps and blight) and served us an enjoyable lunch by nice folks. The current building was built by the Southern Sugar Company (which later became the US Sugar Corp.) in 1938 after the original burned down. The Inn’s Everglades Lounge, in which we ate our lunch, is famous for its impressive 360-degree mural featuring the flora and fauna of the Florida Everglades. It was painted by the world-renowned artist J. Clinton Shepherd in the early 1940s.
This photo is an HDR (high dynamic range) image – handheld. Post-processed in Nik HDR Efex Pro and Lightroom 3.