Do you enjoy living in the Sunshine State? I certainly do!
I was raised here, but went to college in Tennessee. And I started at the second term—January. There was snow on the ground when I arrived, and for much of the term temperatures were almost unendurable for us who were from farther south. Then in one day spring was upon us! The sun came out, and the birds began to sing. A friend of mine said, “Tim, I feel like I have died and gone to Florida!”
I knew exactly what he meant.
Every year more people discover that they love Florida, but few are much aware of the Florida of yesterday. Not many years ago, Central Florida was defined by the orange. Groves were everywhere. Even the air was dominated by oranges, from the sweet fragrance of orange blossoms to the acrid pungency of the juice plants.
It is what I call the Last Cracker Period. Florida, BME – Before the Mickey Era.
Central Florida now has a predominantly service economy, but during the Last Cracker Period the area was agricultural. Sanford was know for celery, and Casselberry for fern. Radishes and sweet corn were grown in Zellwood, and Apopka had truck farm vegetables and foliage. But oranges were everywhere.
Virtually every community was based on oranges. When I was young, I went to the top of the Citrus Tower on Hwy 27 south of Clermont. It was my favorite tower. Some people like the Bok Singing Tower, and I like it too, but I preferred the Citrus Tower. From there I could look in any direction and there were orange groves as far as I could see—all the way to the horizon. It was beautiful.
The groves drew a lot of workers from other southern states. Many were migrants, but some stayed. During the busy season, picking, packing, and shipping were done in shifts.
My parents moved from Alabama, and worked in the groves. They slept days and worked nights at the plant. My dad was a fork lift operator. One day he was moving barrels stacked on skids from one area to another. He ran his forks under the skid, flipped the lever, and business went through the roof! Literally. He was rewarded for his work with a permanent vacation.
He went to another citrus plant, however, and became a valued employee.
The great danger to the groves was freezing weather. Before the groves multiplied in Central Florida, the grove lands were around Jacksonville and St. Augustine. A severe freeze came through there in the late 1890s followed by a second freeze in 1898. Orange trees can survive a freeze, but it weakens them. The impact of two freezes in quick succession destroyed the groves of North Florida, so the growers came further south.
Central Florida has occasional cold winters, and such was the case when I was in high school. Many high school boys picked up some cash by staying up all night in the bitter cold groves and tending the smudge pots and burning stacks of old tires. Many a night I reflected on the terrible cold and the suffering of my friends from my warm bed.
The orange groves affected every part of our lives.
They provided a meal for the hungry traveler. Until I was an adult, I never bought an orange. We either picked them from our own trees when we had them, or friends kept us supplied. However, even when walking down the road, we would often stop to pick an orange. The grove owners did not mind. Of course, they were not happy with those tourist who would stop and open up their car trunks!
The proper way to eat an orange is rapidly being forgotten. One takes a fresh orange and squeezes it and rolls it hard in their hands to break up the juicy sections inside. Even using a table to roll it on is appropriate.
Next, use a pocket knife to cut a circle of peal away from one end to prevent the acid from burning the lips and face, but leaving the white under peeling in place. Then make a small hole at the very center of the circle and drink the juice from it. Squeeze it good to drink it dry.
Finally, pull the peel apart and eat the pulp adhering to the inside of the pieces of peel. Yum! Yum!
Orange groves were a great place to pray. Many times the men of the church would go into the groves to pray. They were loud, but bothered no one from the middle of the groves. Some knelt right in the sand in their suit pants, while the wimps took the less spiritual route of bringing cardboard.
But they were not a great place to go parking! And I am not the only one to have my car pulled from the sand by a tow truck while my date tried her best to look inconspicuous.
However, the most practical use of oranges in daily life was as orange grenades! When I visited cousins In Alabama, we would play cowboys. “Bang! Bang! Your dead!”
“No you missed me!” How could you tell with invisible bullets? In Florida, we solved that problem with chinaberries. They came in convenient clips of twenty or thirty on a single branched twig, and we could actually "shoot" each other with them. But they were not as useful for all out war as orange grenades.
Many of us had orange trees in our yards, and we could not eat or give away all the fruit, so some of it would fall, fully ripened, to the ground and lay there—sometimes for months. They were perfect because one could pick them from the ground by the top side where the peel was still intact, but the bottom was moldy, and green, and mushy. When you were hit by one of those, you knew it, and so did everyone else. There was no “You missed me!” with an orange grenade.
I remember one great event when two mighty armies converged on the school ground. As we went forward, I launched my first grenade to land in front of the advancing enemy. As it hit the ground, it exploded and splattered three or four of them. The next I aimed at a specific target and hit him square in the chest. I am sure he sunk for a week.
It has been many years since I have seen fleets of open topped trucks heaped with oranges, or oranges spilled from those trucks along sharp turns in the roads. I do not know when I last saw furniture improvised from orange crates, or orange crates in back yards serving as trains, fighter planes, or stage coaches. The old juice plants have become warehouses and produce no odor at all.
What happened? What became of the groves? Three things occurred.
The first was air conditioning. With the advent of air conditioning, those who previously could not survive the heat flocked to Florida by the hundreds of thousands.
Then there was Mickey, and the service industry began to encroach on agriculture.
Finally, in the 1970s there was a recurrence of the events that destroyed the groves of North Florida. Two hard freezes occurred in Central Florida and the groves were devastated. The growers decided it made less sense to rebuild than to sell the land for housing developments to accommodate all the people moving to the area. The groves moved farther south.
I was in college in Tennessee when the freezes happened, and I knew of the devastation. Without the groves, I wondered if there was a place in my heart for Florida again.
But then I was driving down for a visit, and as I drove through South Georgia on I-75 nearer and nearer to the Florida line, I began to get excited. And when I passed the Jennings exit and saw the sign, Welcome to Florida, I just had to sing!
I want to wake up in the morning where the orange blossoms grow
Where the sun comes peeping into where I’m sleeping
and the songbirds sing hello
I like the fresh air and the sunshine, they’re good for us you know
I want to make my home in Florida, where the orange blossoms grow
I learned that there was a place for me in Florida, and I soon discovered that orange blossoms still grow in Central Florida if only you know where to look.
--Tim Chastain
Chastain Central
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