A public argument in 1892-93 warned that Avon Park’s frost protection was unproven
Every promotional document Avon Park produced in its first decade rests on one claim: that the town stood below the frost line, protected by its lakes, where tender fruit could be grown in the open. Crosby’s pamphlets say it. Pabor’s Pineapple says it. It was not accepted at the time. It was argued about in public, in the state’s leading farm paper, for at least two months, and the man who disputed it was right.
The argument
Writing in The Florida Agriculturist of 4 January 1893 under the heading “Water Protection and Pabor Lake Pineapple,” James H. White answers W. E. Pabor and a correspondent named R. H. Burr point by point.[fa-1893-01-04]
White had written in the Agriculturist of 30 November 1892:
It is the same old story, “below the frost line.” Every new comer in South Florida is “below the frost line,” or claims to be. If this claim is made for his own amusement it is a very innocent amusement, but when it is made to induce people to buy his land, making them believe they can raise pineapples without protection where oranges are hardly safe from frost, is another thing.[fa-1893-01-04]
Pabor had replied, in the Pineapple and in the Colorado Graphic, that at Pabor Lake “the rarer tropical fruits, such as the guava, mango, sapodilla, tamarind, sugar-apple, as well as the pineapple and banana — fruits of the far South — can be successfully grown… in the open air without protection, and the profits upon them are very large,” and that “we have here this very ‘local water protection’ of which Mr. White writes.” He had also offered the maxim that “frost, we fancy, is more a matter of altitude than latitude.”
White’s answer is worth quoting at length, because nothing else states the case against the town’s own advertising so plainly.
It is a well known fact that all that region is liable to frost, except where they have local water protection, and the new comer has no means of knowing where these protected places are except by trial. Even an old settler would be liable to make a mistake in that matter… Without doubt there are such protected places there, but to say that the whole township of Avon Park is so protected is more than any man can know until it is all brought under cultivation. And it does not savor of either sound or honorable business methods to work the tropical racket so heavily upon untried localities.[fa-1893-01-04]
On Pabor’s altitude maxim he is equally direct: “This certainly is a fancy rather than a fact.” Radiation frost on a still night settles into low ground, he explains, but a blizzard takes the high ground worst — “latitude is a constant factor while altitude is an inconstant one.”
He also disposes of Pabor’s evidence. Of H. G. Burnet, who “has sought and feels that he has found in this lake protected region a location eminently adapted to tropical fruits,” White writes: “Mr. Burnet is not the first one who has had that feeling. Many another one has felt just that way before, but when the blizzard came and their tropical pets were all dead they felt differently. But feeling is no guide in such matters. A grain of common sense is better than an ocean of feeling, and experience is better than either.”
A further point of White’s bears on the town’s records. Burr had complained that White judged Avon Park by Fort Meade’s thermometer. White answers that Fort Meade’s “is the only record anywhere near Avon Park” — which is to say that in 1892 Avon Park had barely begun keeping one. The Weather Bureau’s Florida tables that same year credit Avon Park with a three months’ record.
Why this matters
It shows the freeze was foreseeable, and foreseen. The blizzard White described arrived in December 1894 and again in February 1895. It killed the citrus outright and took between ten and forty per cent of the pineapples. The Florida Development Company went to a sheriff’s sale in January 1897, and the town’s population fell from nearly 500 before the freezes to 128 after them — roughly three-quarters of its people gone. It did not pass its pre-freeze size again until some point between the census of 1910, when it held 285, and that of 1920, when it held 890.
It puts the promotional literature in its context. Crosby’s and Pabor’s claims about frost were not innocent optimism repeated by everyone. They were contested claims, made to sell land, and a contemporary in the same trade press called the practice dishonorable while they were making them. Any exhibit that quotes the promotional material should quote White beside it.
It shows the boosters answering back in public. Pabor did not ignore the criticism; he took it up in his own paper and in a Colorado one, and drew in R. H. Burr and Dr. F. W. Inman of Winter Haven. Avon Park’s reputation was being fought over across the state press.
References
- fa-1893-01-04 — James H. White, in The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.). The Florida Agriculturist, 4 January 1893, page 3: Water Protection and Pabor Lake Pineapple, by James H. White. 4 January 1893. florida-agriculturist.md
Related
- William E. Pabor
- Pabor Lake colony
- Oliver Marvin Crosby
- Report: Avon Park in The Florida Agriculturist, 1890-1910
- Finding: Avon Park had nearly half a million pineapple plants before the freeze
- Report: the founding of Avon Park and its first decade
Where this comes from
- Evidence
- single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
- Review
- unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
- Rights
- society
Sources
- James H. White, in The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.), The Florida Agriculturist, 4 January 1893, page 3: Water Protection and Pabor Lake Pineapple, by James H. White (1893)
Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.
Have a question about this record?