June 4, 2026
Lake Alfred, Polk County: The Shoreline Where Florida Citrus Got Its Laboratory
In 1917, the state of Florida planted its first off-campus research center on the shore of this lake — and a century later, almost every commercial citrus tree in the state traces back to work done there
In 1917, the State of Florida opened the first off-campus research center the University of Florida had ever established, and it put it on the shore of Lake Alfred. They called it the Citrus Experiment Station. It was the first time the state had decided that a particular industry — and a particular crop — needed its own permanent laboratory away from Gainesville, sitting in the middle of the groves it was meant to serve.
The choice of Lake Alfred wasn't accidental. By 1917 the town existed because of the railroad — the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West line that Henry Plant eventually absorbed into the Atlantic Coast Line, the same line that gave the town its name from Alfred Parslow. The Florida Fruitlands Company had been working the surrounding land since 1910. The groves were already here. The packinghouses and rail sidings were already here. What the industry didn't have was a place to take a sick tree, or a strange beetle, or a question about rootstock, and get an answer from someone whose entire job was citrus.
That's what the station became. A working laboratory inside a working grove belt, on the edge of a 676-acre lake, in a town small enough that the researchers and the growers were neighbors.
The implications of putting it here, and not somewhere else, are still rolling through Florida agriculture. Rootstock trials done on this shoreline are the reason most commercial Florida orange trees grow on the rootstocks they grow on. Cold-protection research done here shaped how growers responded to the freezes of the 1980s that pushed the citrus belt south. When greening disease — huanglongbing — arrived in Florida in 2005 and began collapsing groves across the state, the research response was anchored at the same Lake Alfred campus, by then known as the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center. The station that opened in 1917 to study scale insects and fertilizer rates is now the center of the global scientific fight to keep commercial citrus alive in Florida at all.
None of that is visible from the lake. The lake itself is a 676-acre public water body, WBID 1488D in the state's tracking system, with a short lakefront walking trail that brings in wading birds and migratory traffic and a couple of endangered plants the signage points out. It looks like what it is — a Polk County lake at the edge of a small town that's quietly growing along the I-4 corridor, with a Publix finally coming to the Lake Alfred Square site at County Road 557 and Old Lake Alfred Road after years of residents driving to Auburndale or Winter Haven for groceries.
The town around it has filled in around the laboratory rather than the other way around. The public library didn't even come under city ownership until 1973, when it landed inside the new Public Safety building on Pomelo Street, wedged between the police and fire departments. It moved again in 2012 to a building on North Seminole Avenue, paid for in part by a bequest from Edwin Moore, a Florida Citrus Hall of Fame member — citrus money funding the library, in a town whose biggest institution is a citrus research station.
That's the layering you can't see from the shoreline. The lake gave its name to a railroad stop. The railroad stop became a town. The town's location in the grove belt brought the state's first off-campus research center. The research center became, over a hundred years, the place the entire Florida citrus industry turns to when something goes wrong. And the people who made enough from citrus to leave money behind are the reason the library has a building.
The Citrus Research and Education Center is still there, still on the north side of the lake, still part of UF/IFAS. It is the oldest and largest citrus research facility in the world. It started in 1917 because someone decided the laboratory belonged next to the groves, and the groves were next to this lake.
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