Muffler Man Sighting in Zephyrhills

Highway giants are larger than life men, dinosaurs, elephants, large statues placed by the roadside to attract tourists and customers. Such giants are found across the nation, not just in Florida, but their fanstasical nature is well suited to our state.

Muffler men date to the 1960s and 1970s, and were large statues of men holding mufflers meant to advertise a muffler or auto repair shop. In Roadside Giants (Stackpole Books 2005), authors Brian and Sarah Butko explain that most muffler men were built by Prewitt Fiberglass of Venice, California. Later known as International Fiberglass, the company made unusually large statues of humans and animals up into the 1970s. Owners, particularly new owners, often give their muffler men new clothes and new items to hold, depending what is to be advertised.

The muffler man at Muffler City on Highway 301 in Zephyrhills is fairly traditional in his appearance and choice of accessory, a wrench. This shop has an example of another type of muffler man as well, the kind made out of old car parts - there he is, leaning against the sign post. Give him a wave next time you're passing by!

Florida Muffler Men

National Muffler Man Tracking Chart and Map

Roadside America's Muffler Man Homepage

Visual Ephemera - Roadside Giants Found!

Crystal Springs Roller Rink

Crystal Springs Roller Rink on YouTube

"Rolling Back Time" St. Petersburg Times, February 6, 2005

The Old Spanish Trail's Zero Marker

The Old Spanish Trail is not really Spanish, nor is it particularly old, at least for St. Augustine. The "trail" began in 1915 as a transcontinental highway for automobiles, connecting St. Augustine in the east to San Diego in the west. The Old Spanish Trail Association began in Mobile, Alabama, where they saw the commercial benefit of having an east/west highway connecting the new north/south Jackson and Dixie highways. Thus, the Old Spanish Trail began in a city known for its French heritage.

These new highways brought automotive tourists and their money to the communities along the roadways. During World War I, advocates of the Old Spanish Trail (and other national highways) promoted its importance as a military road, vital for national security and defense, anticipating Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system by several decades. In the 1920s, Harral B. Ayres, the Old Spainish Trail Association's director, encouraged the notion that the highway followed old Spanish roads, using the romance of the past to promote tourism.

The terrain the highway was to cover in the southeastern United States hampered construction - bridges were needed over the many rivers and swamps of the coastal South. The Old Spanish Trail was not completed until 1929, an event marked by a three-day celebration in St. Augustine, and the dedication of this commemorative marker (which since has been moved twice).


















Each year, on the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May, Crestview, Florida, holds the Old Spanish Trail Festival. This year will be the event's 53rd anniversary, and is only 11 days from now!

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The Story of the Old Spanish Trail, by Harral B. Ayres (Old Spanish Trail Centennial)

A Florida Fresh Market

Primed by promises of fresh, local produce, I visited a local fresh market this week for the first time in a long while. I surmised that since a lot of vegetables are grown in Florida, that a fresh market in Florida would have little room for foreign fruit. So I was disappointed to see Chilean grapes and California avocados.

I acknowledge my hypocrisy in expecting local produce in Florida, a state whose vast agricultural economy is based on selling to people who live elsewhere. For centuries, Florida farmers have made their livings by selling oranges and green beans and strawberries to people far, far away. Pioneering farmers loaded citrus onto steamboats and trains so that hotels in New York City might serve sectioned fruit to their guests. Thousands of men were lured to Florida by the promise of a better life as a gentleman farmer, with ten acres in the country and a house in town.

Indeed, there were several local products available at the Oldsmar Fresh Market that I do not see at my local Publix or Wal-Mart Supercenter. There were fresh breads from a local bakery, fresh Gulf seafood, and honey from local bees. Of course there were Florida strawberries, and Ruskin tomatoes. There was a table of Florida citrus, and not the shiny perfect fruit that gets mailed away in gift baskets, but the duller, lumpier fruit Floridians keep for themselves because it tastes so good. Here were the Florida grapefruit, the Temple orange, and the Honey Murcott. The Temple and the Honey Murcott oranges are both tangors, crosses between tangerines and sweet oranges. The Temple orange gave its name to the city of Temple Terrace, where larges groves of the fruit once grew. The Honey Murcott orange is named after Charles Murcott Smith who first planted groves of this variety nearby in Pinellas County.












"Home cooking: Surviving for a week on locally grown food" (St. Petersburg Times, October 24, 2008)

Now, That's a ...

A clue -- these usually aren't painted lavender.

It's the shovel bucket from a dragline, used in Florida to mine phosphate. It's hard to tell from this picture, but this shovel is really big. You could walk around in there. Draglines and shovels like this were a tremendous step forward in efficiency compared to the handheld shovels and wheelbarrows used when phosphate rock was discovered in Florida in the 1880s. At first, miners dug for river-pebble phosphate, but draglines let them pull off the oveburden and get to buried phosphate rock deposits more easily.

Florida phosphate is a major source of fertilizer for the nation and the world, and has been economically important to the state for over 100 years. Downsides to mining are primarily environmental, from the actual soil removal to energy and water use, to the slightly radioactive by-products stored in mountainous gypsum stacks. Most of Florida's phosphate comes from the Central Florida Phosphate District or Bone Valley, where the corners of Hillsborough, Polk, Manatee, and Hardee counties meet.

This particular shovel can be found to the side of MOSI in Tampa. Yes, that's a red dinosaur in the background.

More Reading about Phosphate in Florida:

Phosphate Primer

Phosphate at the Crossroads

Mulberry Phosphate Museum

One Last Big Push for Phosphate Mining

Florida Mine Map (pdf)

Renewing West Tampa

This weekend was the First Annual Renew Tampa event, highlighting connections between historic preservation and environmental conservation. Part of Renew Tampa was a two-day schedule of speakers and an expo hall of architects and builders, which was held at the historic Berriman-Morgan cigar factory in Tampa (click here for Tampa Tribune's special report on the Berriman Morgan factory, including an interesting interactive graphic of the building and its history). The factory is currently being renovated by Jammal Engineering.

In past decades, after cigars were no longer made within its walls, the Berriman-Morgan factory stood empty. Interstate 275 cut the factory off from the rest of West Tampa, and today the interstate is being widened, bringing the highway right up to the factory lot.

Cigar factories are not heavy industrial sites, and so neighborhoods grew up around them, with houses immediately across the street. It was Old Urbanism, with home, work, school, and stores all within walking distance. Or if not, you could hop on a streetcar to get there. Looking out the windows of the Berriman-Morgan factory, a few remnants of this pattern of development can be seen.

After the event, I drove home, cutting through West Tampa on Howard Avenue. As I passed by Baker & Co., I stopped and turned around and went back. It's an antique / nostalgic general store in a restored historic brick building. They have a tea room for group events, and you can buy rose-scented soap, nickel candy, or bleacher seats from Wrigley Field.

Behind the store is this funny little house, one of a string of similar funny little houses on the block. This is a common pattern in West Tampa, where the entire neighborhood wasn't built at one time by one developer like suburbs are today, but where a small developer or single landowner owned a few city lots and built a few houses using the same design. These then generated rental income, an investment.

Going back to the store's parking lot, this is what you see:

This is the Centro Espanol de West Tampa, built as a branch of the El Centro Espanol in Ybor City, a social club and mutual aid society for Spanish immigrants in Tampa. In recent years, the fate of the Centro Espanol de West Tampa building has been up in the air, but today it is the temporary home of the Tampa Museum of Art. The museum itself has been in the news a good bit, but the short end of it is that the collections are being housed here while a new museum building is being built downtown.

I stopped in, but I hadn't realized the museum closed at 4 on a Saturday. I apologized to the woman at the desk for coming in 10 minutes before closing. That's fine she said, it'll only take you five minutes to go through the gallery anyhow. Oh-kay....

So I went ahead to the gallery, which is around a post and through what looks like a tiled cafeteria. There's lots of white. And the exhibit was mostly pen and ink or charcoal, just occasional color. But it was pretty good, what there was.

Websites showing renovation of Centro Espanol de West Tampa:

windows

molding and exterior trimwork

Florida News Stories

"What If?" (by Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post, February 17, 2008) "Florida has been the scene of several near-misses that would have dramatically changed history."

"Mud-spattered tales from the Forgotten Coast of Florida" (St. Catherines Standard, February 9, 2008) "Lash a dead deer or a couple gutted wild boars to the ATVs racks, and you could likely run for sheriff. "

"Miami in June" (Isle of Man Today, February 15, 2008) "After graduating from the University of Kent in June, a friend and I felt we definitely deserved a holiday."

"Vultures Settling Into Urban Areas" (Miami Herald, February 9, 2008) "The winter visitors rest on high-rise balconies and peck at the rubber around automobile windshields. They leave abundant whitewash, and on rare occasions have flown into jets at altitudes greater than 3,500 feet. They roost, and often dine, communally."

"A stylish tradition: Mr. I Got 'Em's spirit lives at the Saturday Morning Market." (St. Petersburg Times, February 9, 2008)

"First lady Laura Bush visits Everglades" (Miami Herald, February 7, 2008) "Airboat rides and snake shows weren't on the itinerary for first lady Laura Bush's maiden trip to the Everglades."

Rainy Day at Tampa Bay Hotel

Even in a February drizzle, the historic Tampa Bay Hotel impresses me. I find it so easy to imagine the past here, ladies and gentlemen promendading on the veranda, waiting for the showers to pass. The leaves of the banana plant show the effects of a winter freeze, although it's warmer in Tampa today than it is in Philadelphia or Long Island. But as fancy as the iced gingerbread is on this building, what lingers in my mind is what went into making the walls.

The Tampa Bay Hotel was a major construction project in the 1880s. To say it was ambitious is putting it mildly. The new was barely worn off the railroad tracks to Tampa, and just hundreds of people lived here when Henry Plant thought of building a resort hotel on the banks of the Hillsborough River. Just where did he think they would find the men and materials for such an undertaking? Well, the men came from all over the country, but the logistics of was finding construction materials in a new frontier town was more difficult.

One need was shell for the concrete, and the builders found what they required where the Alafia River met Tampa Bay in the form of prehistoric shell mounds. Eating oyster and clam and mussells creates some trash. Shell mounds and shell middens are places where shellfish remains are discarded and accummulate, at times forming small hills. Often, other trash or refuse would get mixed in with the shell, such as bones from last night's dinner, or a broken bowl. If the mounds got big enough, they were useful as high pieces of ground, either a vantage point or somewhere out of the water. Today, archaeologists study and protect shell mounds, but in the lat 19th century, people all over Florida mined these hills for shell. The shell was used for road construction, or as in the case of the Tampa Bay Hotel, for making concrete. I wonder what was mixed into those walls along with the shell....

(Photo: Shell mound at New Smyrna, Florida State Archives, PR07602)

In another instance of resourcefullness, the Tampa Bay Hotel builders salvaged old submarine cable, selling the copper, but using the fiber and metal as construction materials. While I suppose you could look for comparisons to modern considerations of green construction or sustainability, they were really just making do with what they had at hand.

Transoceanic cable came to Florida shortly after the Civil War, through the efforts of the International Ocean Telegraph Company. The installation of telegraph cable was very important for south Florida, which in the 1860s was barely explored, much less settled, by the United States. Cable lines and railroads went as far south as Cedar Key, and that was it. South Florida was quite isolated from the world, and from knowledge of world events or markets that might provide needed capital. In 1867, the IOTC put up poles and telgraph wire from Cedar Key to Gainesville, and on to Lake City. The wire raced southward from Ocala to Dade City, then to Polk County and along the Peace River. Following the Caloosahatchee River, the wire reached Punta Rassa, where it connected with submarine cable from Key West. Another submarine cable connected Key West and Cuba.

Telegraph service in Florida began in 1867, and in following years IOTC added connection from Florida and Cuba to Jamaice, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. The Florida - Cuba cable stayed in operation into the 1940s, and in the 1950s IOTC became part of Western Union.

In a 1989 journal article, Canter Brown, Jr., considered the impact of the IOTC cable on Florida, noting that while non-Florida contractors supplied materials, the company did created much sought-after jobs in south Florida. On a less positive note, Brown pointed out that the IOTC's early impact was limited by high prices it charged to send a cable -- "$4.00 in gold for transmitting a ten-word message from Lake city to Cuba" -- which was out of reach for the average Floridian. Brown considered the cable company's most significant impact to be from the roads it built along the wire's route. "Wire Road" became a major north/south corridor for pioneers settling south Florida in the late nineteenth century.

So when I look at the Tampa Bay Hotel, I think of both the historic events that took place within its walls and the history that went into its walls.

If you'd like to visit the Tampa Bay Hotel, your best option is the Henry Plant Museum. The museum now offers handheld audio tours, and an exhibit about Gasparilla's history.

Sources:

Plant's Palace: Henry B. Plant and the Tampa Bay Hotel, by James Covington (Harmony House, 1990)

"The International Ocean Telegraph" by Canter Brown, Jr. (Florida Historical Quarterly, 1989, Volume 68, Number 2, Pages 135-159).

Holiday Shopping

I can't go to a museum without meandering through the gift shop, especially this time of year with all the seasonal goodies. Many museums shops sell crafts, decorative items, foods, stationery, toys, and books. These are great places to find a special gift, and make a purchase supporting local cultural institutions.

The best way to enjoy shopping is to visit the museum, then make a personal appearance in the store, but some museums have online catalogs for your convenience. I'm listing a few links here, but I haven't personally tested these museums' online services.

Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens Store
Flagler Museum Store
Henry B. Plant Museum
Florida's History Shop
Edison & Ford Winter Estates Online Store
John and Mable Ringling Museum Store
Key West Art & Historical Society Online Store

SS American Victory

The SS American Victory is docked in Tampa's Channelside District, between the Florida Aquarium and the cruise ship terminal.

SS American Victory is a World War II Merchant Marine Victory ship, now serving as a maritime museum. Although this particular ship was built in California, it is an effective reminder of the many, many ships built in Tampa during the war at the docks visible from the American Victory's decks.

Garrison Channel, looking west toward downtown to the right -- Harbor Island to the left, Tampa General Hospital on Davis Islands straight ahead.

Ybor Channel (part of the Port of Tampa, looking north toward Ybor City). When the Ybor Estuary was dredged in the early twentieth century, creating the channel, the Port of Tampa drew commercial shipping away from the Hillsborough River. It is now the largest port in Florida.

Sign Sign

Somehow I missed this article a couple of months ago in the Orlando Sentinel: "Roadside signs light way to our community's past," which was accompanied by a map of Central Florida's Historic Signs.

Super Signage has more photos of great old Florida signs.

The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati leads a nationwide effort to preserve these bulky relics, and the National Park Service's Technical Preservation Services division has written a booklet, Preservation of Historic Signs.

Do you have a favorite old sign in Florida?

Florida -- Read All About It

"50 Years Later, Seminole Tribe of Florida Marks Key Date" (Sun-Sentinel, Aug. 22, 2007) "...from termination to self-determination."

"26 Florida Companies Make Inc. 500" (South Florida Business Journal, Aug. 23, 2007)

"State Puts Bridge Inspections Online" (Tampa Tribune, Aug. 20, 2007)

"Dearborn Should Sell Its Florida Property" (Editorial in The Detroit News, Aug. 23, 2007) The City of Dearborn, Michigan, owns a Clearwater condominium building.

"Miami Nice -- And Naughty" Jewish Exponent, Aug. 23, 2007. "...Miami's thriving and varied Jewish scene that features dozens of synagougues, scores of kosher restaurants and a handful of mikvot."

"Dancin in the Street Helped Revitalize Downtown Stuart" (tcpalm.com, Aug. 24, 2007) 20th anniversary of program sponsored by Stuart Main Street. Florida Main Street is a statewide program designed to promote economic development while preserving historic buildings.

"Hunting a Hurricane" -- A St. Petersburg Times special report about the Hurricane Hunters based at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base.

"10 Things" The Sun-Sentinel is running a series giving 10 reasons to visit local attractions -- among the featured sites are Miami's Seaquarium, Coral Gables' Venetian Pool, the John D. MacArthur State Park, Peanut Island, and Flamingo Gardens.

History is a Business Asset

"Innovative." "Industry Leader." "Successful." These are positive words -- but can your company back them up with facts and concrete examples? Here are some examples of how Florida companies use history online to put some substance behind those claims.

Innovation is the result of problem solving, a new idea or technology developed in response to a challenge. Innovation sets one company apart from another, and showing how your company has met past challenges encourages customer confidence in your future. An example of innovation from a Florida company? Tropicana's Juice Train solved the problem of shipping fresh orange juice to the Northeast.

A company's creation story helps customers connect with the company and its product on a personal level. Publix's website shares the story of founder George Jenkins, who worked hard during the depression and in the 1940s took out a mortgage to open his dream store, the first supermarket in Florida.

Corporate experience and corporate history go hand in hand, and online timelines highlight acheivments. For example, in 1960, Ryder was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1998, Palm Harbor received the EPA Energy Star Certification.

Consider incorporating your company's history into your next marketing campaign.

Gilded Age Resort Hotels

The Belleview Biltmore is just one of Florida's great Gilded Age resort hotels still standing today.

In St. Augustine, Henry Flagler's Hotel Ponce de Leon is now part of the Flagler College campus.

His Alcazar Hotel is the Lightner Musuem.

The Casa Monica is a hotel again, after years of service as the St. Johns County Courthouse.

The Breakers in Palm Beach is still in business, although the original hotel building burned, and the current structure dates to the 1920s rather than the Gilded Age.

Henry Plant's Tampa Bay Hotel, like the Ponce de Leon, is part of a college campus (University of Tampa), although part of one wing is the Henry B. Plant Museum.

In The Architecture of Leisure, Susan Braden traces the role of the two Henry's, Flagler and Plant, in creating Florida's winter luxury resorts: "These two wealthy New York businessmen ... effectively transported urban cultural ideas to Florida, transforming a sparsely inhabited, scraggily beautiful near-wilderness into what they promoted as the 'American Riveria.'" Braden's thought-provoking book explores not only why Flagler and Plant built the hotels, but the thinking behind the exotic architecture, and what this all said about the society and culture of the time.

Sweden House Smorgasbord

Here's a postcard I found. It's of the Sweden House Smorgasbord, which was at 2720 North Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa. It's not there anymore, but that address puts it near Columbus and Dale Mabry, generally where the Dodge dealer is now.

The back of the postcard says:

Every Day - Hot Dishes - Cool Sparkling Salads
Tampa's Finest Smorgasbord Service
Fine Food and Gracious Dining
Without Extravagance

Other Florida locations were in Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg, with others in Illinois.

I don't know anything else about this restaurant (I'm guessing it dates to the 1960s or 1970s?), but perhaps some of you do!

A. Santaella Cigar Factory

Yesterday's mystery photo was of the front steps of the A. Santaella factory on Armenia Avenue in West Tampa. The former cigar factory is being transformed into the West Tampa Center for the Arts.

Cigar factories are simple, yet elegant in their functionality and detail. The architectural design is quite deliberate -- large open rooms with space for workers, walls of windows for light and ventilation. Each factory had its own water tower -- some were separate, others were concealed in fancy towers. ("Anatomy of a Cigar Factory Building")

Marilyn Esperante Figueredo told the history of this factory in Cigar City Magazine: "The Best of the Best: The Story of the A. Santaella Cigar Factory."

It's a different factory, but this video tour of the J.C. Newman Cigar Factory is interesting, too.

The Gonzalez Habano Cigar Company's map of surviving cigar factories in Tampa, with photographs

Frogs!

"Time's fun when you're having flies." -- Kermit the Frog

In a state closely associated with with reptiles, the amphibians are sometimes overlooked. However, organizations such as the Southwest Florida Amphibian Monitoring Network and the Hillsborough River Watershed Alliance's Frog Listening Network are keeping their eyes - and definitely their ears - open. It's important work, since amphibians can be indicators of the health or decline of our environment.

But for those of you who aren't the type to be convinced by gentle green throat-clearings, there is the movie Frogs!, starring 1970s vintage Sam Elliot, Ray Milland, and Joan Van Ark. Filmed in part at Eden Gardens State Park and Panama City Beach, Frogs! shows what happens when you spray too many chemicals on the hoppy creatures. That's right, nature gets even. The film's poster is a bullfrog with a severed hand in its mouth.

Perhaps those amphibians are just upset because they just read Ralph Stoutamire's 1952 publication, Bullfrog Farming and Frogging in Florida. Florida's frog industry was but a tadpole, but Stoutamire gave advice on the design and management of commercial frog farms. The best chapter is the "Statement of F. B. Cramer, Sr., President of the Southern Industries, Inc., Frog Farm Located Just North of Tampa, Florida." Page 35 shows Mr. Cramer himself, a respectible looking man wearing a tie, with his spectacles tucked into his shirt pocket as he holds a large spotted dangly-legged frog. To feed his frogs, he relies heavily on fiddler crabs found on bay beaches (Page 37 shows his special crab-catching apparatus). He sells the legs and arms to canners, and tans frog skins to be made into leather "ladies shoes, belts, purses, key rings, the covering of artificial bait for fishing and other novelties." The photos are great -- to illustrate how big the frogs are, a lovely lipsticked young lady holds two enormous amphibians by the feet. On the next page, four grim frog hunters pose with headlamps and gigs. Evidently Wauchula was the centrepointe for catching wild frogs, with 29,000 pounds shipped out in just 5 months of 1941. Stoutamire: "As a wild bullfrog seldom weighs more than 2 pounds, even the pessimistic must admit that is a lot of frogs."

Stoutamire's pièce de résistance is 16 pages of "Famous Ways to Serve Giant Frogs." Yes, 16 pages of 1950s frog recipes such as "Giant Frog Sandwich Spread," "Jellied Great Bullfrog Creamed Salad," and "Giant Bullfrog Fondue." I kid you not.

Florida News Stories

"Dr. Fleas: As the 50-year-old market closes, so does a way of life" (Palm Beach Post, April 29, 2007 -- developer buys flea market, plans to build townhomes)

"Dough! Not my job: Cuban bread maker" (Tampa Tribune reporter spends day making bread at Ybor City's La Segunda Bakery)

"Drought has varied effect on Lake O life" (Naples Daily News, April 29, 2007. How Lake Okeechobee's low water level affects people and animals)

"Historic house on the move-Again" (April 24, 2007, Miami Herald -- Annie Beck bungalow in Fort Lauderdale)

"Parkway designation gone with Ivan's winds" (opinion piece in Pensacola News Journal about scenic highway in the Panhandle)

Linoleum and Touch of Tung Oil

This may not seem like it's about Florida at first, but bear with me.

Recently I read Linoleum, by Jane Powell and Linda Svendsen (Gibbs Smith, 2003). It's a coffee table book--oversized, glossy photos, not too much text. Yes, an actual entire book about linoleum, the floor covering of the hoi polloi. The photographs really make this book, transforming linoleum into abstract pieces of art. The text covers much the same territory as other books and journal articles on the topic, but with a welcome sense of humor. The last part of the book recounts the author's experiments to determine whether linoleum can withstand cat pee. (We're not to the Florida part yet.)

Frederick Walton, an Englishman, invented linoleum in 1855. It was basically canvas or burlap coated with oxidized linseed oil, cork dust, and resin. There have been variations on this over the years, but the key point is that linoleum uses natural products and is not vinyl.

Linoleum originally was made from linseed oil, which came the name. But later other kinds of oils were used, among them, tung oil. Tung oil comes from the nuts of the tung tree, which is native to China. The oil has other industrial uses, including as an ingredient in varnish.

Heading into the twentieth century, China was the leading producer of tung oil, and had cornered the market. So some Americans looked around for where tung trees might grow well in the United States, and came up with north central Florida. The first tung trees were planted in Florida in 1906, and the first oil was produced from their nuts in 1913.

Wars disrupted supplies of tung oil from China, which in turn encouraged increased production in Florida. The zenith of Florida's tung industry was during World War II. Jefferson County claims to have been the center point of this industry, with over 12,000 acres of tung oil trees in the 1950s.

But the tung trees weren't the only thing happening in Jefferson County at the mid-century mark. A young man named Homer Formby used some of that oil to make his own line of furniture finishing products. His first store was in Jefferson County, in the old Monticello Opera House.

Storms, freezes, and competition put an end to Florida's tung oil industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Formby made a pile of money, sold his company, and in the 1970s/80s owned some islands down in the Keys.

Florida just may be the Kevin Bacon of the 50 United States.

Sugar

U.S. Sugar is closing its Bryant Mill, which opened in 1962 north of the small town of Pahokee.

"U.S. Sugar Closes Historic Bryant Mill as Industry Struggles in Florida" (Sun-Sentinel, April 9, 2007)

Sugar has been produced commercially in Florida for nearly 250 years, probably beginning in New Smyrna. The Bulow Plantation sugar mill was destroyed during the Seminole Wars, and the antebellum sugar plantations of David Levy Yulee and Robert Gamble are now state parks. In the 1880s, Hamilton Disston tried large-scale production of sugar in St. Cloud, but weather and soils pushed sugar growers further south, down to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Sugar growers relied heavily on seasonal labor, and in the 1930s and 1940s, and even into the late 20th century, the cane fields were hot spots for migrant labor issues. After the U.S. embargo on Cuban goods in the early 1960s, there was an increased demand for Florida sugar. Sugar production is still strongly tied to international trade and labor issues, recently the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Read More About It:

Big Sugar, by Alec Wilkinson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)

Cuba's Sugar Industry, by Jose Alvarez and Lazaro Pena Castellanos (University Press of Florida, 2001)

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, by Michael Grunwald (Simon & Schuster, 2006)