Maitland Historical Museum

Sharing the same shaded campus as the Maitland Art Center, the Maitland Historical Museum tells the story of one of Central Florida’s older incorporated towns through the objects, photographs, and papers its own residents left behind. The museum traces back to 1970, when a group of longtime Maitland families organized the Maitland Historical Society to collect and preserve local records before they were lost. For decades the Society operated its own small museum before merging formally with the Maitland Art Center in 2010 to form the combined nonprofit now known as Art and History Museums of Maitland.

The permanent collection covers Maitland’s founding in the 1880s as a citrus growing community along the Orlando chain of lakes, its incorporation in 1885, and its evolution over the twentieth century into a residential suburb of greater Orlando. Exhibits include artifacts from the citrus packing era, when freezes and market swings shaped the local economy, alongside materials documenting the Florida Audubon Society, which was headquartered in Maitland for many years and helped establish some of the state’s earliest bird protection efforts. Rotating displays also touch on Maitland’s early hotels and lakeside resorts and the families whose names still mark local streets and parks today.

Because the museum shares its building and grounds with the Maitland Art Center, visitors often move between the two without noticing much of a seam, viewing pioneer era furnishings and historic photographs in one gallery and contemporary paintings or sculpture in the next. A single admission ticket, purchased in the Art Center lobby, covers entry to the Historical Museum as well as the neighboring Telephone Museum, so one visit can take in the town’s civic history, its communications history, and its art scene together.

The Maitland Historical Museum keeps the same hours as the rest of the campus, open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with extended hours until 8 p.m. on the last Wednesday of each month, and closed Mondays and major holidays. General admission is six dollars for adults, five dollars for seniors and children ages five through seventeen, and free for children under five, college students at UCF, Valencia, and Seminole State, active military and veterans, and Art and History members. Maitland residents can also visit free of charge after registering for a no cost annual membership.

For anyone researching family history in the area, working on a local history project, or simply curious how a small citrus town on the Orlando chain of lakes grew into the community it is today, the Maitland Historical Museum offers a compact but well documented look at that story, curated by the same organization that has looked after the town’s civic memory for more than fifty years.