The History of Florida (76 page)

on our earth.” Citrus evolved into Florida’s chief export at the same time it

transformed into a cultural icon.11 With appropriate irony, the state with so

many non-native residents chose a non-native species, the orange, as the

state fruit and its blossom as the state flower. Backyard citrus trees became

proof

as common as shrubbery. Streets, subdivisions, buildings, counties, festi-

vals, and a championship col ege-footbal bowl adopted names from the

fruit. In 1998, the legislature selected the orange as the background graphic

of standard automobile license plates.12

Popular literature credits Juan Ponce de Léon, who brought the first cat-

tle to Florida, with planting the first orange trees in Florida. No one real y

knows which Spaniard introduced the fruit. From nearly the first European

contact, Florida elicited comparisons with the Mediterranean. Indeed, the

province lay closer to the equator than Valencia, the great citrus-growing

region of Spain, and it seemed an ideal place in which to expand New World

production. Writer John McPhee says that Spain mandated that ships go-

ing to the New World take citrus for planting. But the Spanish never man-

aged to make much of a citriculture in Florida. For one, the Spanish variety

was sour in taste. The fruit escaped settled areas, like Columbus’s swine in

the Caribbean, and began growing in the wild. Indians harvested oranges

from feral groves, roasted them, and sweetened them with honey. After the

British took possession of Florida, citrus production turned into a genu-

ine export, with varieties harvested in north Florida, Georgia, and South

364 · Jack E. Davis

Carolina. Growers continued to ship oranges, lemons, and limes during the

second Spanish occupation of Florida, and by the time the territory went to

the Americans, nurseries were falling behind grower demand for saplings.

Within two decades, citrus took over as the leading agricultural product on

Florida’s east coast. The year before the cataclysmic freeze of 1894–95, the

state’s growers packed 5 million ninety-pound crates of oranges.

The first central growing area encompassed the lower St. Johns River in

northeast Florida. A slow-moving mass with more than a dozen tributar-

ies, the St. Johns begins in the south from a series of watershed marshes in

Indian River County. It flows north 310 miles to its mouth on the Atlantic

Ocean at Jacksonvil e. The St. Johns is Florida’s longest river. Up to three

miles wide, it is also the most navigable. The Timucuan Indians thrived

alongside it, and Jean Ribault and the French saw logic in settling its mouth

(despite underestimating the ruthlessness of Menéndez). In the heyday of

river commerce, no other Florida river produced the same bustle. Some

of the state’s most important cities resided on its banks. Much of the land

around it lay above flood levels, and, as does any large body of water, it

curbed temperature extremes. The Spanish, British, and Americans grew

cotton, indigo, and citrus in the region. Harriet Beecher Stowe tended a

smal grove at her riverside Mandarin home. From the basin of the St. Johns,

proof

citrus growing spread down the Ridge, a highland region running through

the upper center of the peninsula. The scent of the orange blossom was

strong in Palatka and Gainesvil e, where groves were planted along city

streets and next to municipal buildings. But occasional hard freezes, be-

ginning with one in 1835, which Floridians blamed on a renegade iceberg

floating off the coast, gradual y forced the center of the industry southward

toward Orlando and the Tampa Bay area and down to the Indian River on

the east.

Citrus was the product of Spanish initiative, but climate al owed it to

endure—or not. Following the most memorable freeze of the century, that

of 1894–95, the event some argue is responsible for the founding of Mi-

ami, land speculators began promoting south Florida to northerners as the

frost-free American Mediterranean. South Florida was not frost free, but

the temperatures along the east coast were moderated by the Gulf Stream.

The region owes its “tropical exuberance” to the ocean current, observes

historian Mark Derr, a climate that not only attracted citrus but generated

a phenomenal tourist industry and real estate market. By the late twentieth

century, south Florida had become the new home to the citrus industry. As

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 365

historian Christopher Warren writes, the “geographic and climatic history

of citrus may be interpreted as growers’ lessons from nature’s catechism, a

rigorous tutorial in respecting the limits of climate, season, and geography.”

Truth be told, growers unwittingly contributed to the conditions that forced

their continual southern migration, never quite mastering the catechism.

Scientists concluded that Florida’s facility in destroying wetlands to make

way for cultivatable cropland and the layered concrete and asphalt of cities

and suburbs pushed the freeze line southward and altered local climate.

The state logged an estimated 12-percent-lower annual rainfal average at

the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning and endured greater

temperature extremes in winter and summer. “Ironical y,” notes journalist

Cynthia Barnett, “when farmers drain wetlands for crops, they increase the

likelihood that freezes will harm those very crops.”13

Freezes were not the lone impetus for the southward drift of citrus. The

rush of people moving to Florida after World War II put growers in the

unwanted position of competing with real estate agents. The latter kept a

hawk’s gaze on land that citrus growers had made high and dry and, unin-

tentional y, exquisitely suitable for housing developments. When they suc-

ceeded in flipping groveland to real estate, developers often left a few citrus

trees on a new-home lot to entice buyers. As the price of land increased,

proof

retiring growers often sold their grove rather than pass it on to the next gen-

eration. This was particularly true in the center of the state, escape grounds

for growers after the devastating 1890s. Ninety years later, history repeated

itself with a little prompting from the land boom ignited by the opening of

Walt Disney World in 1971. After two hard freezes in the 1980s, tract homes

quickly replaced miles and miles of ruined citrus trees on the rolling grove-

land that encircled Orlando. Once the producer of 40 percent of the state’s

orange crop, central Florida acquired a new ranking as one of the nation’s

leading sprawl areas. In 2000, a mere 6 percent of the state’s oranges shipped

from the area.

The industry again had moved deeper into the peninsula to survive out-

side popular growth areas. By 2000, 61 percent of the crop was grown in

the southwestern interior. Overal , citrus occupied 830,000 acres, down

from 1 mil ion in 1992. Stil , with more than $1.6 bil ion in cash receipts,

“Big Citrus” survived. Hybridization, breeding, fertilizer, and pesticides al-

lowed late-twentieth-century growers to produce ten to fifteen times the

amount of product per acre, with trees holding two to three times more

fruit, than their predecessors did a century earlier. The innovation of frozen

366 · Jack E. Davis

concentrate to aid the Allied effort during World War II and the skyrocket-

ing demand toward the end of the century for refrigerated single-strength

juice revolutionized citriculture. Growers harvested 244 mil ion crates of

oranges in 1998, with only 5 percent of that fruit consumed fresh. Big Citrus

had gone liquid.

Florida could support citrus and cattle because it had a lot of land, nearly

40 million acres of it. Although the state boasts the oldest European-estab-

lished city in the United States, nearly three hundred years passed before

whites settled the lower peninsula with conviction. As Douglas pointed

out, Florida had a “long frontier.” Her measure was both geographic and

chronological. The shrinking availability of land in northern states and

worn-out soil in traditional agricultural regions such as the Piedmont and

the Carolinas were sending Americans west and south. Beginning with

the second Spanish occupation, an expanding number were putting down

stakes in Florida. The U.S. territorial government set up land sales offices

and hired land surveyors, and Congress passed the Donation Act in 1824

and the Armed Occupation Act in 1842 to advance the frontier line south-

ward. The progression of homesteading whites was a foreboding develop-

ment for Florida Indians—Seminoles, Miccosukees, Creeks, Yuchi, and

Choctaws—many of them agrarian people engaged in local trade and the

proof

territorial economy. The Florida militia and U.S. military waged war to force

the Indians onto a reserve. Compared with the “rich prairies of Alachua,”

where many had lived, the agricultural potential of the first reserve, in cen-

tral Florida, was poor enough to compel the Indians to war. Even territorial

Governor William Duval conceded that the “lands are wretchedly poor and

cannot support them.” Following seven years of conflict, the few hundred

Indians who had avoided relocation to the West were restricted to a second

reserve, located roughly between the Peace River and the Gulf of Mexico.

This time, authorities tolerated no complaint, believing the reserve was

blessed by nature’s providence. Captain John T. Sprague, the federal officer

in charge of Florida Indian affairs, wrote military authorities in Washington,

“The game of the country, climate and natural productions places them [the

Indians] above sympathy or charity, every necessary want is supplied.” An-

other war, nevertheless, broke out.14

During both, Indians used water and wetland as a defensive bulwark.

It was an effective strategy. George A. McCal , aide-de-camp to General

Edmund P. Gaines during the Second Seminole War, noted in a letter to

his father, “it is much to be apprehended that the Seminole will retreat to

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 367

the lower part of the peninsula, and cause the troops much fatigue to bring

them to bay.” Indeed, the Seminoles led the military into the “almost inac-

cessible” Big Cypress Swamp and Everglades. “Today officers as well as men

have been compelled to wade in the mud, sawgrass, and water, and assist the

sailors in dragging the canoes,” wrote midshipman George Henry Preble in

his diary. “On the sick-list,” he noted a month later, “foot badly inflamed and

legs ulcerated; poisoned by the sawgrass of the Everglades and exposure to

the mud.” For fifty-eight days, the expedition of eighty marines and sailors

trudged through the nation’s largest wetland, locating numerous enemy en-

campments but arriving after the Indians had departed. Many soldiers were,

nevertheless, taken with the hospitable parts of Florida. “Florida as far as my

own experience extends is as healthy as any other parts of the United States,”

wrote James B. Dal am of Baltimore to his brother. “I shal undoubtedly

permanently establish here.” Paradise eluded him, though. He was kil ed

during an Indian raid on his encampment near Charlotte Harbor. After the

final war, perhaps 200 Indians remained behind in Florida. They lived in the

Big Cypress, Everglades, and the Ten Thousand Islands, which one soldier

called a “most hideous region.” “It seems,” said another, “expressly intended

as a retreat for the rascal y Indian.” The Everglades was a savage land to

many soldiers, suitable for only a savage people.15

proof

Despite the removal and seclusion of Indians, the migration stream of

white settlers slowed. At the start of the Civil War, the U.S. census counted

only 140,000 free and slave people living in Florida, fewer than any other

southern state. At the turn of the century, the population density, 9.8 people

per square mile, was less than half the national average. Open range re-

mained plentiful (for the time being). Cattle roamed freely. They “wandered

the swamp edges and the big pine and palmetto flats” of the interior, writes

storytel er Leo Lovel. They “had to be hunted, gathered, branded, treated for

screwworms, counted, eventual y herded up and sold.” This was the job of

cracker cowboys, who communicated with each other and their cows using

frayed- or braided-leather bul whips to crack the air, “louder than a rifle

shot,” a sound that some say gave the Florida herdsmen their name. “Those

‘Crackers,’” says Lovel, “had to be woodsmen,” making do “with what the

land provided like swamp cabbage, wild onion, fish and game, gator meat,

the much prized gopher turtle.” They drove cattle across the prairies much

as would the more familiar cowboys of the American West. There were

panthers plenty to take a steer. Equal threats on the drive to Punta Rassa

and Tampa, where ships conducted cattle to Cuba and other locations,

368 · Jack E. Davis

materialized in deadly lightning strikes, more common in Florida than any