Kismet

Kismet is a vanished citrus town in Lake County, Florida, now absorbed into the Ocala National Forest. The community was established in 1884 by the Kismet Land and Improvement Company, and it drew settlers hoping to build a prosperous agricultural hub. Plans for a St. John's and Eustis Railroad extension once promised to connect the town to broader markets, but the Great Freeze of the late 1800s devastated the local population and sent most residents elsewhere. Nothing of the original settlement survives today.

Kismet holds a quiet footnote in American cultural history as the place where Elias Disney married Flora, making it the unlikely backdrop to the origin story of the Disney family. Visitors come primarily out of curiosity about that connection and the town's forgotten past. With no structures, markers, or facilities remaining, the experience is purely one of landscape and imagination within the surrounding national forest.