The Town That Kept Its Oranges

Before the freeze, the 1894 harvest had brought in five million boxes of citrus. Six years later, in 1901, the entire state managed 975,000. The damage to Florida's economy ran past one hundred million dollars in 1895 currency; the methodology behind that figure is not in the record.

December was not the end of it. A second freeze came in February of 1895, and it was the second one that killed what the first had wounded. Trees cut back to the stump had pushed new green growth in the January warmth. Those were the ones that died in February. The commercial citrus belt of northeast Florida, which had been the heart of the industry, was finished. Accounts of the timing differ. Some sources treat the Great Freeze of 1895 as a single event, others as back-to-back freezes spanning two winters. The damage was the same either way.

There is a story, repeated by the Orange County Regional History Center and by the Orlando Sentinel, that the freeze scared some citrus-growing English settlers into skedaddling so fast they left unwashed dishes on the dining room table. Both sources call it legend rather than record. Whether any specific table was actually left set, no one can say. That the groves were abandoned in numbers large enough to generate the legend — that part the harvest figures confirm.

The freeze line in December reached Tampa and the Manatee River Valley. Groves further inland and further down the ridge came through in better shape. Among them were the groves at a small settlement in southern Polk County called Keystone City.

Keystone City's trees lived. Not all of them, but enough that when the February freeze arrived, the settlement still had fruit on the branch. The Ledger, in 2018, put it plainly: local citrus groves survived the killer freezes of December 1894 and February 1895, which wiped out commercial citrus in the Northeast Florida heartland at that time.

The town renamed itself Frostproof.

According to the local history site frostproof.net — a town promotional source, and worth flagging as such — a Frostproof grower sent the only Florida citrus entered in the Atlanta Fair of 1897. Every other grove that might have competed was dead or still recovering.

The Volusia County historical society writes that the industry took decades to recover. The 1894 production number of five million boxes was not matched again for a long time, and when it was matched, it was matched by groves planted somewhere else. The center of Florida citrus moved south along the ridge, into Polk and Highlands and the counties below, and it stayed there.