THE FLORIDA QUEST |  |
Hideaway Times
Friday, April 6, 2001
'Orange Fever' lured many early settlers
By MORRIS SULLIVAN
Neighbors Correspondent
Helen DeLand once wrote of one stop during her steamboat ride from Jacksonville upriver toward what would soon become DeLand:
"At Mandarin, I picked my first orange in the grove of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe... I have only a blurred vision of the people, but the oranges! 'apples of gold in pictures of emerald.'"
The daughter of DeLand's founder, Henry A. DeLand, never forgot that vision of golden oranges and wrote about it in her 1928 book on the history of this area.
"That's what they all came here for -- to plant oranges," said Bill Dreggors, executive director of the West Volusia Historical Society. "When Mr. Terry (Henry DeLand's brother-in-law) got here, there were already oranges growing."
Citrus trees first appeared in West Volusia in 1868, when settlers planted a grove near Seville. In the next 25 years, "Orange Fever" drew hundreds of people to the area, many of them hoping to get rich quick.
The plan for many settlers, Dreggors said, "was to plant a few orange trees and, in six or seven years, the money would come rolling in."
As it takes six to seven years from planting to production, the early settlers had to bring enough money to live on for that period.
From DeLand, oranges were packed in barrels and -- until trains came in the late 1880s -- shipped north by steamboat. They had to be clipped from the trees with part of their stems intact or they would rot before they reached their destinations. That made harvesting oranges a tedious business until methods for processing them into concentrate form were finally developed in the 1960s.
"DeLand came down (from Fairport, N.Y.) because his brother-in-law was going to get rich off it," Dreggors said. When Terry took DeLand to see the land that soon would become his namesake, it was to show him what he considered to be some of the best "orange land" in the county. Tired of the baking soda business, DeLand decided to follow Terry's example and purchased a large tract of good grove land.
The career move paid off and, for a time DeLand saw his fortune grow, both through operating his own groves and from marketing the area to others, infecting them with orange fever, then selling them land, running advertisements in northern papers enticing others to follow his lead.
Ironically, it was orange fever that became DeLand's financial undoing. In 1884, a hard freeze wiped out virtually all of the orange crop. "It didn't get cold enough to kill the trees," Dreggors said, "but it killed the oranges before they had a chance to ripen and be sold," so no one made any money that year.
The very next year, even colder weather killed most of the trees in the area. While some growers began replanting, "lots of them got fed up and left," Dreggors said.
"DeLand had promised that if anyone bought property from him and decided they didn't like it, he would buy it back."
After the big freezes, he had to take back much of his property. "He had to pay back all those people, and that hurt him," Dreggors said.
In the winter of 1894-95, another hard freeze swept through central Florida and again decimated DeLand's groves. This time, the city's founder and many of his friends gave up on the citrus industry.
DeLand returned north at the age of 60 to begin another baking soda plant. Through the success of that enterprise and by selling off his Florida property and many of his New York holdings, he eventually made good on his promises to repay those who -- under the influence of orange fever -- had bought property from him.
One of the heroes of DeLand's citrus industry, Lue Gim Gong, came to the area from Canton, China, by way of San Francisco. He arrived in San Francisco at the age of 12 and began working his way across the country to Massachusetts, where he met Fanny Burlingame. After he survived a bout with tuberculosis, Fanny brought Lue to DeLand where she had an orange grove.
Lue had grown up on a farm in Canton and immediately began growing oranges alongside Fanny's brother-in-law, William Dumville. For several years, the two of them planted oranges and other fruits.
Lue lost his groves in the freezes of 1894 and '95. Dumville died and his wife moved back North, leaving Lue to replant the groves on his own. After Fanny died, Lue continued to manage the groves and experiment with growing better oranges.
In 1911, Lue cross-pollinated two varieties of oranges, the Mediterranean Sweet and the Hart's Late to create a new variety, which he named after himself. The new orange ripened early in the fall and was more resilient to cold. The Lue Gim Gong earned a Silver Wilder Medal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the first such award ever given for citrus.
During those first decades of West Volusia settlement, citrus fruit was virtually the sole industry. However, the native pine trees provided another source of income for some people.
"The next most important [agricultural product] was pine wood and turpentine," Dreggors said. Before planting a grove, a homesteader had to clear his land of its pine woods. The timber could be sold upstream to fund the years before the orange trees began producing fruit.
In the beginning, logs had to be floated down the river toward Jacksonville to be sold, "but sawmills and turpentine stills sprang up after people got down here." One of the few turpentine stills in the state has been preserved and restored at the Pioneer Arts Settlement at Barberville. None of the remaining stills in Florida are active.