St. Cloud is a city in northern Osceola County, Florida, United States. It is on the southern shore of East Lake Tohopekaliga in Central Florida, about 26 miles (41.8 km) southeast of Orlando. The population was 35,183 in the 2010 census, and 54,579 in the 2019 census estimate. The city is allocation of the Orlando–Kissimmee–Sanford metropolitan area.

St. Cloud was founded as a retirement community for Civil War devotion veterans, and gained the nickname “The Friendly Soldier City”.

During the 1870s, Hamilton Disston of Philadelphia took an inclusion in developing the region while on fishing trips subsequent to Henry Shelton Sanford, founder of the city of Sanford. Disston contracted later the Florida Internal Improvement Fund, then in receivership, to pay $1 million to offset its Civil War and Reconstruction debt. In exchange, Disston was awarded half the house he drained from the state’s swamps. He dug canals and, in 1886–1887, established St. Cloud sugarcane plantation, named after St. Cloud, Minnesota, although many longtime locals claim the town was named after Saint-Cloud, France.

Disston opened the Sugar Belt Railway to the South Florida Railroad in 1888 to carry his product to market. But the Panic of 1893 dropped house values, and the Great Freeze of 1894–1895 ruined the plantation. Disston returned to Philadelphia, where he died in 1896. The Sugar Belt Railway merged into the South Florida Railroad. An attempt to cultivate rice in the Place failed, and for several years the home remained fallow. Then in 1909, the Seminole Land & Investment Company acquired 35,000 acres (14,000 ha) as the site for a Grand Army of the Republic veterans’ colony. St. Cloud was agreed because of its “health, climate and productiveness of soil.” It was first permanently approved in 1909 by William G. King, a genuine estate bureaucrat from Alachua County who had been answer the responsibility “to plan, locate and develop a town.”