Pabor’s own account of the freezes, written five years after he arrived
The Florida Agriculturist of 6 October 1897 gives its front page to an unsigned article headed “Five Years in Florida.”[fa-1897-10-06] It is the fullest first-person account of settling on the Lake Wales Ridge found so far, and it contains the only description of the freezes of 1894-95 written from inside this district by someone who lived through them here.
Who wrote it
The article is unsigned in the text as machine-read, but the author identifies himself in everything but name:
- “Twenty-five years of residence in various parts of Colorado, with more or less of pioneering and town building work mixed with newspaper experience”
- a nervous collapse, and medical advice “to seek a lower altitude”
- “after a month of California, I came to Florida in the middle of the summer of 1892”
- he “decided to settle in Avon Park township, in DeSoto county, securing about one thousand acres of land bordered by half a dozen lakes”
- his purpose: “I could gather about me a little settlement in the woods of those who, like myself, broken down in health or fortune, could here, perhaps, recover both”
- “within three months I found my sixty years dropping away from me”
- and later, of the same place: “the little colony settlement at Pabor Lake, which soon had its postoffice and monthly newspaper”
That is William E. Pabor, the Colorado colonist and newspaperman who helped found Greeley and founded Fruita in Colorado, and then Pabor Lake on 18 July 1892. The printed page image confirms that the article appeared as a lead front-page feature without a trailing byline.
The acreage is notable. While the Pabor Lake Pineapple cited 1,400 acres in October 1892 and a September 1894 reprint cited 2,000 acres, Pabor’s own retrospective 1897 account clarifies that his original purchase in Avon Park township was “about one thousand acres of land bordered by half a dozen lakes.”
Why he chose pineapples
The reasoning is set out plainly, and it explains the whole shape of the local economy in the 1890s:
The orange industry in that year seemed overdone and, in any event, would take five or seven years before returns would come in; but the pineapple was a fruit that would yield returns in two years from planting and all the figures I had observed gave a net profit of from $300 to $500 per acre; so that if one had five acres he might reasonably expect to be able to live comfortably.[fa-1897-10-06]
Land was selling at $15 to $25 an acre and, he says, proved “capable of producing 10,000 pineapples on each acre.”
The freezes
Then, in December, there came an icy blast from Dakota and the land of flowers was as a mother mourning for her children and refusing to be comforted. It was but for a night, but apparent desolation followed the path of the icy visitor. Yet, had there been no more of it, all would have been well with Florida, for it soon was apparent that the heart of pineapple and guava, mango and other tropical fruits had not been injured and the citrus trees soon showed that no vital spot had been reached. Within a month renewed vegetation was rampant; then in February, ’95, came the climatic convulsion that moved the orange belt section one hundred miles further south in the State and destroyed all hopes of a pineapple crop for the year.[fa-1897-10-06]
Then the observation that mattered locally:
Even then, in the pineapple districts, it was found that the plants were not killed; only laid prostrate to the ground. The warm, dry sand held no moisture for an inch or so below the surface and so the frost had nothing to feed on. By April the tiny green leaves were shooting up… So we lost two years by the freeze but we learned that the pineapple was safer than the orange.[fa-1897-10-06]
This is the mechanism behind the figure reported a month earlier in the same paper — half a million plants in the ground before the freeze, ten to forty per cent killed — and behind the fact that Avon Park still had pineapple plantations being founded in 1897.
What he told prospective settlers afterwards
Asked “can a poor man succeed?”, he answers against his own interest as a land seller:
In the section that I am in no man with a family could establish himself and support his family until his pineapple crop came to its first ripening, unless he has money enough on hand to pay his living expenses for two years… on general principles I would say $500 would be the least sum, while $1,000 would comfortably establish him. The first two years are the critical years. There may be in Florida places where laboring men may be in demand; but I have not seen such places. Regular employment cannot be counted upon.[fa-1897-10-06]
And he is equally blunt about what the ridge is not: “For the farmer, the sand hill region I am in, is not the place to come to. Neither is it the place for the vegetable grower unless it be for tomatoes.”
That is a promoter, five years in, telling the truth about the place — and it is also a direct statement that there was no wage labor to be had at Avon Park in 1897, which bears on the town’s labor history.
References
- fa-1897-10-06 — Unsigned; almost certainly W. E. Pabor, in The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.). The Florida Agriculturist, 6 October 1897, page 1: Five Years in Florida. 6 October 1897. florida-agriculturist.md
Related
- William E. Pabor
- Pabor Lake colony
- Report: Avon Park in The Florida Agriculturist, 1890-1910
- Finding: Avon Park had nearly half a million pineapple plants before the freeze
- Finding: a public argument in 1892-93 warned that Avon Park’s frost protection was unproven
- Lake Wales Ridge
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
- Unsigned; almost certainly W. E. Pabor, in The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.), The Florida Agriculturist, 6 October 1897, page 1: Five Years in Florida (1897)
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