Orange County is located in central Florida. This is the home of Universal Studios Florida, Epcot Center and Walt Disney World. Orange County was officially founded in 1845 and now contains 907 square miles of land area and 97 square miles of water surface. The county seat is Orlando.

Orange County is home to what was Orange Island: part of the very first bit of what is now Florida to emerge from below the ocean 33.9 to 28.4 million years ago during the Early Oligocene period. At Rock Spring a fossil-bearing layer of rock has given up many specimens of birds and mammals from a million and more years ago.

Orange County was originally named for the local orange crop but oranges haven't been much of a crop in the area since a series of freezes in the 1980's wiped out so many of the citrus trees in the county. The main economic drivers these days are tourism and housing developers. The housing market in the area has been such that at its peak, up to 7,800 acres of farmland were being converted into residential developments every year (that changed with the mortgage crisis in 2008). However, the county long ago outgrew the capacity of the roads in the area to carry all the traffic...