by Eric Rutkow
6
New Frontiers
Orange Empires
AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED in 1894, Henry Flagler, the preeminent developer and promoter of eastern Florida, sat in his St. Augustine home, shivering, praying that the temperature fell no further. But the mercury plunged mercilessly lower, flirting with the freezing point, and it finally dipped below thirty-two degrees on December 24. In most parts of temperate North America this news might not have meant catastrophe, but Florida was different. It possessed a semitropical climate, one especially friendly to oranges, a fruit of tropical origin that grew on trees highly susceptible to frost. The impending freeze meant the likely ruin of countless thousands of these trees, a devastating blow to the state’s economy. James Ingraham, Flagler’s business associate and confidant, explained: “As the orange industry was the principal [one] at that time in Florida, it seemed as if this freeze was a fatal thing and could not be overcome, and in almost every family dependent upon the orange industry it seemed as if death and disaster were in their daily lives.”
Flagler was one of the few Floridians not directly reliant on the actual selling of oranges. He had amassed a fortune as a young man through Standard Oil, the company he cofounded with John D. Rockefeller. (When asked if he’d originated the plan for what became the largest company in America, Rockefeller supposedly replied, “No, sir. I wish I’d had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.”) Flagler’s interest in Florida began in the 1870s, when he first visited the state hoping that the salubrious climate might restore his ailing wife. The warm temperatures failed to save her, but they nonetheless appealed greatly to Flagler. By the mid-1880s he had removed himself from the day-to-day operations of Standard Oil and relocated permanently to St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied city in America, founded in 1565 by a Spanish explorer and located on the state’s northeastern coast.
In spite of St. Augustine’s rich history, Florida—especially its southern and eastern portions—remained one of the last frontiers in continental America, certainly among the eastern states. The civilization that had denuded much of the East Coast and the interior forests had made little impact here. William Cullen Bryant visited the state in 1873 and wrote: “East Florida still remains, for the most part, a forest.” He considered outposts like St. Augustine “merely stations in the great forest, which, . . . where it is not swamp, is a sandy plain covered with the trees of the long-leaved pine.”
Americans had only begun to encroach on this expansive forest in significant numbers during the decades following the Civil War. Unlike earlier pursuers of the frontier, these settlers were often not seeking cheap lands, but solace and health. Their ranks included many well-to-do and notable Americans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was perhaps the most influential book of the nineteenth century. For these northern transplants, orange groves—signifiers of both cultivation and tropicality—were a defining criterion. Bryant observed, “On the more fertile of [the marshy] spots grow lofty live oaks and magnolias, and here the settler makes his openings, and builds his dwelling, and plants his orchard of orange trees.” Nearly all of this preliminary settlement activity and orange tree planting occurred in the northern part of the state. The numbers dwindled dramatically as one headed south, due largely to an almost complete lack of infrastructure.
When Flagler relocated to St. Augustine in the 1880s, he did not approach the state as a typical pioneer agriculturist. Rather, he wanted to exploit Florida’s potential as a new hub of eastern tourism, and thus began building hotels in places like Jacksonville and St. Augustine. His investment portfolio quickly expanded to include local railroads, the main mechanism for bringing in tourists. Eventually, he gained outright control over the Florida East Coast Railway, giving him a monopoly on regional rail construction, the key to commercial development.
By the time of the first great freeze in 1894, Flagler’s train network extended as far as Palm Beach, making it the state’s de facto terminus. Here he built one of his most impressive projects, the Royal Poinciana, a five-hundred-room hotel modeled on the popular retreats of the Catskills. The attractions of Palm Beach were not merely the climate or Flagler’s hotel, but the distinctive trees for which the town was named. They conveyed splendor, exoticism, and the feel of the tropics—variations of palm trees would become a staple plant in almost all of the nation’s warmer climes. (Palm Beach’s landmark trees were not in fact native but had appeared somewhat serendipitously: Twenty years earlier, a Spanish vessel had foundered offshore and local salvagers had raided its cargo of coconuts and planted them across the barrier island that is present-day Palm Beach.) The palm was only one of the plants used to reinforce the area’s tropical feel. Others included agaves, bananas, cacti, poincianas, and, of course, the ubiquitous orange tree.
While Palm Beach was almost 250 miles south of St. Augustine, this distance was not great enough to spare it from the devastating Christmas freeze of 1894. Even here, the temperature dropped far below thirty-two degrees several times that winter. It seemed, for the moment, that no orange tree in the state was safe. Thousands of disappointed settlers began returning north. The situation greatly distressed Flagler, not only because of the money he would lose but because he felt a paternal affection for the state and its inhabitants—at one point, he turned to his associate Ingraham and ordered: “You can use $50,000, or $100,000, or $200,000. I would rather lose it all, and more, than that one man, woman, or child should starve.”
In the midst of this crisis, Flagler received a most welcome package, a bundle containing healthy orange blossoms. They had come from lands farther south, where the state was still almost wholly undeveloped. In the most commonly accepted version of the story, the package came from Julia Tuttle, a northern transplant who owned massive holdings in the area of present-day Miami. She had been pressuring Flagler for years to extend his railroad, but he had rebuffed all such entreaties. The reason she was now sending this package, according to her daughter-in-law, was “to prove [Tuttle’s] point that the disaster had not touched Miami.” Along with the orange blossoms, Tuttle gave Flagler an assurance: If he delivered her a train, he could have a portion of her land holdings.
Tuttle’s surprise package proved even more persuasive to the state’s great developer than she could have hoped. Upon receiving the blossoms, Flagler turned to his agent Ingraham and asked, “How soon can you arrange for me to go to Miami?” Plans to extend his rail line the seventy miles from Palm Beach to Miami commenced almost immediately. By April 1896, barely fifteen months later, the final tracks were being laid to connect Tuttle’s small, isolated outpost with the rest of the nation. That July, 502 voters incorporated the city—the local council pressed to name it “Flagler,” but the target of this honor urged them to keep the original Indian name—and Miami was born.
Bolstered by the orange industry and tourism, the new city grew rapidly. Ingraham recalled, “There were hundreds of people who had come into this territory to engage in trucking, vegetable gardening, putting out nurseries of young trees, who had been brought in by the railroad and encouraged to settle this community.” Flagler constructed new hotels and hired laborers to improve the overall infrastructure. By the time the great developer died in 1913, the young city’s population had swelled to nearly twenty thousand. It eventually became the nation’s sixth-largest metropolis, after New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia.
The orange tree was, in many respects, the key component in the founding and early growth of this vibrant American city as well as all of Florida. But the story of Flagler, Tuttle, and the great freeze was merely a small chapter in a larger tale, one that was unfolding three thousand miles away in the foothills of Southern California.
LIKE THE APPLE, the orange had a long history before it arrived in the New World. It was initially cultivated several thousand years ago as a hybrid of two citrus varieties thought to have originated in the Malay–East Indian Ar
chipelago. References to the fruit first appeared in the second book of the Five Classics, a Chinese work from roughly 500 BCE. The orange reached the Western Hemisphere in 1493 as part of Columbus’s second voyage and then spread throughout the Americas in parallel with the growth of the Spanish Empire.
When Franciscan missionaries first reached present-day California in the mid-eighteenth century, they brought orange trees with them. It was common for each mission to feature a few of the trees with their fragrant white blossoms and dark green leaves. In 1804, the padres of the San Gabriel Mission outside the pueblo of Los Angeles planted four hundred seedlings in a six-acre grove, the largest in the region to that point.
The first person to appreciate the fruit’s commercial potential in Southern California was William Wolfskill, a trapper from Boonesborough, Kentucky, who emigrated to Los Angeles in 1831. Ten years after his arrival, he planted a two-acre orchard within the tiny city’s confines. An 1858 report from the California State Agricultural Society sang the praises of Wolfskill’s produce: “The oranges . . . were of superior size and excellence, showing conclusively that these tropical fruits can be raised in Southern California perfection.”
While Wolfskill had confirmed the region’s potential for commercially grown citrus, seemingly countless obstacles stood in the way of significant production. For starters, much of the Southern California land with the best soil and temperature for growing—the foothills of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, for example—was arid and thus inhospitable to the water-loving trees. Even if the land were irrigated, no transport network existed to ship the products to the lucrative markets back East. And in addition to these logistical quandaries was the problem that no demand yet existed. Most Americans in the northeastern population centers had never actually seen the fruit and knew little about the trees it grew on.
Despite these challenges, some intrepid Americans, hearing tales of Southern California’s agricultural potential, began to stake out towns along a fifty-mile-long stretch of land that began at Los Angeles and extended eastward. This region would soon be known across the state and the nation as the Citrus Belt.
No town within this zone embodied the burgeoning citrus culture better than Riverside, located near the Santa Ana River. It had begun in 1870 with an appeal from Judge J. W. North, a man whose advocacy of racial equality had made him a pariah in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. His initial announcement declared, with great optimism: “We wish to form a colony of intelligent, industrious and enterprising people, so that each one’s industry will help to promote his neighbor’s interests.” Twenty-five like-minded middle-class families from the East—few of whom had any agricultural experience—signed on as members of what became the Southern California Colony Association. The group purchased the Riverside site in 1871 for $3.50 an acre; nearly everyone set out a grove of orange seedlings.
In addition to planting trees, the early Riverside settlers devoted their capital, skill, and labor to improving the surrounding infrastructure, particularly the irrigation. In 1881, two men constructed a series of concrete pipes to channel water from streams in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains toward the town. Several years later another colonist financed a $175,000 canal to siphon part of the Santa Ana River and irrigate four thousand acres in the region. A contemporary account marveled, “Its course is eleven miles long, and runs around the edge of a mountain, across high aqueducts, and through sixteen tunnels, one of which is seven hundred feet in length.” This project, the largest waterwork of its time, paved the way for the countless irrigation ventures that soon helped establish the citrus industry.
Initially, Riverside families experimented with a wide variety of orange trees, as it was commonplace to propagate different seeds and hope for the best. But this practice was about to change—forever reshaping the citrus industry—thanks to the actions of one of Riverside’s founding families (as well as a fair bit of chance).
Luther and Eliza Tibbets were an odd couple: fiercely progressive, intolerably quarrelsome, and intensely devoted to spiritualism, a belief in supernatural communication popular at the turn of the century (no less than Gifford Pinchot was an adherent). Before settling in Riverside, the Tibbetses had lived in Washington, D.C., next door to William Saunders, the superintendent of gardens and grounds for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Saunders, who was also in charge of plant importation for the fledgling USDA, had recently acquired a dozen orange cuttings from a consul stationed in Bahia, Brazil. They were unique in having come from a mutated tree that produced seedless oranges; moreover, each fruit contained an embryonic orange within, giving it the appearance of possessing a navel. Eliza Tibbets likely knew nothing about these novel navels, but she was aware that Saunders was a horticulturist and wrote asking for any samples. Saunders explained, “[She] was anxious to get some of these plants for her place, and I sent . . . them by mail.”
The Tibbetses lacked irrigation (a by-product of one of Luther’s countless petty squabbles), and Eliza, according to legend, resorted to using dirty dishwater to nurture the newly received cuttings. Unsurprisingly, not all the Brazilian samples survived, but two managed to thrive and produced fruit after several seasons. In the winter of 1878–79, Mrs. Tibbets submitted several of her oranges, which she called Washington Navels, to the annual Riverside Citrus Fair. They immediately caused a sensation. One of the first men to taste them said, “We . . . sampled the fruit, and wondered how it could be. Larger and juicier and more pungent fruit we had never known.”
The new variety quickly became the standard bearer for California citrus, accounting for more than 50 percent of the marketplace. Less than a decade after they first appeared, one grower was already able to assert, “The Washington Navel stands to-day the peer of any orange known in the market, and is really the autocrat of the price list.” More than one million Washington Navel orange trees were planted across the Citrus Belt during the 1880s, all grafted from the two Tibbets trees. Following the Washington Navel in popularity was the Valencia, a variety the Wolfskill family likely brought to Los Angeles in 1876. Together these two types accounted for nearly all of Southern California’s oranges moving forward, and since the Navel ripened in winter and the Valencia in the summer, the region suddenly had a crop that could be available all year round. But the question remained: How would the product reach the East?
The original transcontinental railroad of 1869 ran only to Northern California, leaving the southern half of the state with no easy way to move freight to eastern markets. But this problem was about to be remedied, almost in parallel with the rise of the orange industry. An extension of the Central Pacific first reached Los Angeles in 1876; five years later, a second transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific (SP), provided Southern California with a direct line to New Orleans; and in 1885 the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line arrived to give the SP competition for eastern commerce. The Wolfskill family held the honor of sending the first full carload of oranges east, a monthlong journey to St. Louis in 1876. A decade later the first special train packed exclusively with oranges departed River Station in Los Angeles.
The railroads, especially the SP, promoted the nascent orange industry out of self-interest. They were able to fill westbound trains with tourists and eager settlers looking to exploit one-way teaser transport rates, but they needed freight to help make the return trips profitable. Oranges, of course, were not the only possible crop, but they represented a high-growth industry at the same time that wheat, one of the biggest Southern California agricultural products from the 1860s to 1880s, was entering a pricing freefall.
SP’s desire to build up the California market was so strong that it almost single-handedly sponsored the state’s exhibit at the New Orleans World’s Fair in the winters of 1884–85 and 1885–86. The display included a three-acre outdoor “California Park” replete with transplanted flowers, shrubs, and fruit-bearing trees, especially oranges. It was at this World’s Fair that fruits from Southern Cal
ifornia swept the overall gold medal for oranges, defeating the heavily favored products from Florida. According to E. J. Wickson, author of one of the most influential late-nineteenth-century books on California fruits, “The premiums won by California oranges at the New Orleans World’s Fair gave us a name [in] the East.” Demand for the fruit skyrocketed, launching a new California “gold rush” in the late 1880s—Sunset, the official publication of the SP, quipped: “Los Angeles and the southern part of the Golden State had no yellow metal, but around 1885 some eastern prospectors discovered an inexhaustible supply of twenty-two karat climate.”
With rapid growth, however, came new challenges. Settlers now scrambled to grab any land that they could find. Prices for orchards shot up, sometimes fivefold in a single year. The clamoring for oranges grew so intense that, according to Wickson, “With all the trees to be had in Southern California nurseries, and all that were brought from Florida, the demand for planting in the spring of 1888 could not be supplied.” The established parts of the citrus industry had other problems on their hands. A pest, known as the cottony cushion scale, began to wreak havoc among the fruits. And the monthlong journey to eastern markets often turned healthy fruit into spoiled mush.
But as the decade progressed the industry learned to handle these manifold issues. Increased irrigation efforts opened up more lands to settlers. The growers combated the cottony cushion scale by importing Australian ladybird beetles, the pest’s natural predator. And the railroads worked steadfastly to address the spoilage problem, developing increasingly elaborate refrigeration systems.
By the early 1890s, the glory days of orange trees had arrived in Southern California. As one grower observed, “The cultivation of the orange in favorable localities, is probably the most profitable business to which an acre of ground can be devoted for horticultural and agricultural purposes.” Riverside was per capita the richest town in the nation by 1895—one of the original Tibbets trees, the source of these riches, was triumphantly transplanted to a prominent location in 1903 during a ceremony that featured President Roosevelt. Pasadena, another town in the heart of the Citrus Belt, boasted a Millionaires’ Row. Residents of these Citrus Belt towns used their wealth to transform their environments into veritable earthly paradises. Not only were their orange orchards immaculately tended, but their properties were lavishly landscaped with ornamental trees, rare flowers, and semitropical plants. To many, California was a new Garden of Eden, with unlimited horticultural potential.
