Winter Garden, Florida, has a beautiful stroll-able downtown, complete with median plantings down the center of Plant Street, an interactive water feature, and a vintage caboose, as well as the trademark town clock. Many restaurants and shops beckon visitors as they explore this vibrant small town.
When you get to the corner of West Plant Street and South Lakeview Avenue, you have arrived at the Pounds Motor Company Building. An identifying bronze tablet tells you something of the significance of the building.
A pioneer in advocating gasoline farm equipment (as opposed to mule powered) Hoyle Pounds established his business at the corner of Plant and Lakeview. In addition to farm tractors he also sold Ford automobiles. The building he commissioned from David Burns Hyer is still in use one hundred years later.
David Burns Hyer was one of a dozen or so architects practicing in Central Florida in the 1920s. Hyer had come to the Orlando area from Charleston, South Carolina, and would return there again as the decade and the Florida land boom ended. He counted among his clients innovative Central Florida go-getters like Hoyle Pounds., who among other achievements, invented the rubber tractor tire.
The impression the building gives is one of basic simple solid construction. You might say, no frills. And that was intentional. The Pounds Motor Company Building was created to showcase, sell, and service farm equipment and cars made by the Ford Motor Company, as well as to dispense first Texaco and thereafter Gulf Oil gasoline. The resultant work by architect Hyer fulfilled all of those functions and also contributed to the streetscape “look” of Winter Garden. It fits the location and the needs of the client.
Today, the causal observer might have a tendency to overlook the elements of the design that made it successful inside and out. The exterior red brick is practically maintenance free for the owner, and is also part of a group of red brick structures that give Winter Garden its signature look. The Pounds Building holds its own and is in harmony with other nearby structures on Plant Street including the contemporaneous Edgewater Hotel.
The front elevation of the Pounds Building is immediately understood. The big plate glass display windows flanking the central doors tell us that something was to be showcased there, for anyone who happened by. Correct. Tractors would have temped the owners of groves and farms from the surrounding area. Above, a string of nine large windows indicated that the work going on inside was well lighted by the Florida sunshine. It was a good location for the machine shop, providing employees with a space that was more comfortable, and therefore more productive. Along the roofline, there was a nod to Mediterranean or Spanish style, a stepped parapet that has a horizonal line modulated by verticals.
One also notices the trapezoidal capitals on the brick piers. They give visual interest, and yet their function is mainly structural. The corner at Plant and Lakeview was once an open, covered filing station for vehicles to pull into, between those brick piers. Vintage photos show it featuring a round topped gas pump.
Along the South Lakeview elevation, one sees several large garage door openings. Only the one closest to the corner of Lakeview and Tremaine remains unchanged since its inception – it is mufti-hinged, paneled wood. One can envision the other openings, now boarded up, being exactly the same.
Along the second floor the large windows, like the ones on the front, continue in groups of threes, giving a geometric pattern on this long side of the building. Similar windows were on the long opposite wall of the building where the Garden Theater now stands.
The Pounds Motor Company Building was designed solidly, to last. A worthy goal for an industrial / commercial building. It has done exactly that, serving its original owners from 1926 and serving its current owners since 1985. The Pounds building has affinities to the most famous early 20th century automotive industrial building, the Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit by Albert Kahn. Modern, efficient, with clean horizontal lines rendered in red brick, the celebrated Packard plant was the inspiration for industrial buildings for decades thereafter, including this one.
About the Architect:
David Burns Hyer
David Burns Hyer was born in Charleston, SC, on March 21, 1875 to parents James S. and Ella Payne Hyer. His early education was in the Charleston schools, and while still a boy he began working in the office of S. Louis Simons. When Simons merged with a partner to create Simsons-Mayrant Company in 1892, Hyer remained in their employ, until he founded his own architectural practiced.
In his professional life, Hyer maintained offices in Charleston SC except in the 1920’s when his office was in Orlando FL. Many fine examples of his work in South Carolina remain to this day.
In Central Florida, he worked with architect John Arthur Rogers before establishing his own practice in Orlando. Hyer’s masterpiece is the ideally situated Grace Phillips Johnson mansion “O-Po-Le-O” (“House Between the Waters”) on the isthmus between Lake Concord and Lake Adair. A grand Mediterranean Revival estate, it is visible from I-4 across Lake Concord, and is locally known as “The Swan Boat House”. The house continues in private hands and is exceedingly well maintained. Hyer’s commercial work in Florida incudes the Pounds Motor Company Building (1926) in Winter Garden, a Prairie-meets-Mediterranean brick building that has been carefully preserved by its owners since the 1980s, Burkett Engineering. Other works by Hyer in Florida are continuing to be identified. When he returned to Charleston permanently, he left James Gamble Rogers II in charge of his Florida work that had not yet been completed.
In 1904, Hyer married Susan Yeadon Mazyck. They were the parents of four children: David B. Jr., Yeadon M., Robert P., and Helen.
Throughout his life Hyer was accorded the nickname “Neighbor” because invariably he greeted others in that friendly way. He was said to have been of a most congenial disposition, which surely served him well in the pursuit of his profession. He had many repeat clients, and they were glad to wait however long it might take him to prepare his designs, even if at a more leisurely pace than other architects. Hyer was an avid golfer and was constantly trying to improve his game.
Late in life Hyer had one leg amputated. He was awaiting an adjusted leg prosthesis when, after a brief illness, he died in Charleston on December 11, 1942 at the age of 67. He is buried alongside his wife in the old historic Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.
(Do you have a photo of David Burns Hyer? I would love to have a copy. Please get in touch with me. Thanks!)
