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Florida Citrus
- 5 min reading time
ACRES N°051 — The FarmSteadfast Story Archive
The fruit that made a state, and the families who stayed when it almost broke.
Sometime in the 1500s — likely Ponce de León, though the legend has loosened around the edges — Spanish explorers planted the first orange trees near St. Augustine. They were searching for gold, for souls, for a fountain that would let them live forever. What they left behind was something quieter: a few seeds in subtropical soil, a fruit that would outlast every empire that touched the peninsula.
For two and a half centuries, the orange grew wild. Native Floridians traded for the seeds and carried them inland. Naturalist William Bartram, traveling the St. Johns River in 1773, found feral orange trees lining the banks like an inheritance no one had claimed. By the time Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, groves of escaped Spanish citrus stretched across the interior — a green secret hiding in the pinewoods.
Then, in 1807, a man named Captain Douglas Dummitt sailed south along the East Coast and smelled something on the wind. Orange blossoms. He followed the scent to a wild grove on Merritt Island, settled his family there, and began grafting sweet orange buds onto sour rootstock — a technique called top-working. His grove would become the first commercial citrus operation in what would later be named the Indian River Citrus District. He is remembered, simply, as the Father of Indian River Citrus.
For a long time, the industry stayed local. Oranges were packed in barrels with Spanish moss and shipped north by wagon and steamboat, arriving bruised, often spoiled. Then came the railroads. Henry Plant and Henry Flagler ran iron lines down the peninsula in the 1880s, and almost overnight Florida citrus became a national fruit. Packinghouses bloomed along the tracks. Crates traveled with paper-wrapped oranges and decorative labels — small works of art now collected in museums. Orange fever took hold. Settlers poured in chasing easy money under the sun.
The reckoning came in the winter of 1894–1895.
In December, the temperature plunged. Growers fired smudge pots and burned logs through the night, trying to wrap their trees in smoke. It wasn't enough. A second freeze in February finished the work. Limbs snapped. Fruit dropped. Entire groves — some of them decades old — turned black overnight. Towns built on citrus emptied. The northern growing belt along the St. Johns, once the heart of the industry, was abandoned. Florida had produced five million boxes of citrus before the freeze. It would not reach that number again for nearly twenty years.
But some stayed. Some moved south. Dummitt's grove, sheltered by the warmth of the Indian River, came through largely intact — and from those surviving trees, the industry was rebuilt. The town of Keystone City, which had also weathered the cold, renamed itself Frostproof. The freezes kept coming — in 1962, 1983, 1989 — and each time, growers pushed the citrus belt a little further down the peninsula, toward Polk County, toward the Indian River, toward the warm sand where the orange could finally rest.
And it flourished. By 1950, Florida was producing more than 100 million boxes of fruit a year. By 1970, more than 200 million. Frozen concentrate, invented in Lake Alfred during World War II, made orange juice a breakfast staple in every American kitchen. Tropicana opened in 1947 and turned the morning glass into a national ritual. Anita Bryant sang for the Florida Citrus Commission and told a generation that a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine. The orange blossom became the state flower. The orange itself became the state fruit. Orange juice became the state beverage. At every welcome center along the interstate, free Florida OJ was poured into paper cups for travelers — a tradition that began in 1949 and has not stopped.
Then, in 2005, a researcher in South Florida found a sick tree.
The disease was called Huanglongbing — citrus greening — and it was spread by a small insect called the Asian citrus psyllid. There was no cure. By 2013, every commercial grove in Florida was infected. In 2004, the state had 748,555 acres of citrus. By 2024, fewer than 275,000 remained. Production fell from 244 million boxes in 1998 to a projected 12 million for the 2024–2025 season — a drop of nearly 95 percent. Hurricanes Ian, Nicole, Helene, and Milton finished what the disease started, knocking fruit from branches and uprooting trees that had stood for generations. Family growers sold. Land was paved over. The groves that had outlasted Spanish empires, Civil War, and four catastrophic freezes faced something they could not outrun.
And yet.
There are still growers in Florida. There are still families on the same land their great-grandfathers cleared by hand. Researchers at the University of Florida are working on greening-resistant trees. New plantings are going in. The Indian River label still means what it has always meant.
This is the story we wear when we wear ACRES N°051. Not a story of loss. A story of staying.
Of the orange that survived the freezes, the railroads, the hurricanes, and the disease.
Of the people who stayed with it.