Who Killed the Florida Orange? Highlight

The Spanish conquistadors rocked up to northern Florida in the 1500s, amid all that marauding, and planted the orange tree, taken from (yes!) China. It was small-time stuff until after the Civil War, when the railroads reached south and the fruit sold north. Historic freezes in 1894 and 1895 nearly eradicated the industry, its first and last real brush with old-world calamity. Instead, it drove things south. Planters started anew in central Florida, in Polk County and its surroundings, what’s known as the Ridge, the highest part of Florida, and the only part that was never below sea level, historically.