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When Florida Strikes Oil

( Originally Published Mid 1930's )

Nobody in Florida expects to find the gold which the Spaniards failed to find, but there are many people in Florida who hope to find oil, and who are backing their hopes with cash. Oil exploration has been going on in Florida since 1903. Fiftythree oil wells have been drilled in the period since the first one was put down at Sumpterville, northeast of Tampa, by oil operators from Pennsylvania, who got down 2,000 feet before their money gave out. They did not find oil, but they did find all of the geological formations which they, as experienced oil men, expected to find.

Since then every successive study of Florida as a potential source of oil has given more encouragement to the belief that there are stores of "liquid gold" underlying the peninsula and that eventually somebody will tap them.

If and when that does occur, Florida will experience a boom besides which all of its previous booms will seem insignificant, from the silk-worm boom of a century ago, when people flocked to Florida in 1838 to plant mulberry trees and grow silk worms for an American silk industry that was to compete with Italy and China, down to the speculative land boom of the 1920's.

The belief that oil might be found in Florida was based originally upon purely a priori reasoning. There was oil all around the great semi-circle of the Gulf, from Vera Cruz and Tampico to Texas and, latterly, to Louisiana. There are oil wells producing out in the Gulf, drilled through the bottom of the sea off the coast of Louisiana. It seemed hardly credible, those who reasoned thus pointed out, that geology took any note of state lines. Why should not the oil formations under and around the Gulf of Mexico extend clear across to its eastern shore?

The enlargement of scientific knowledge of oil formations, of scientific methods of detecting oil indications and of the technology of oil drilling have continued to encourage wild catters to sink their drills in various parts of Florida. Fortythree wells were shallower than 4,000 feet, two went down deeper than 6,000 feet, every one of them showed "signs" which to experienced oil men's eyes encouraged the belief that there was oil in paying quantities somewhere under Florida. Oil men with experience in the Oklahoma and East Texas fields are not given to discouragement if they drill fifty or a hundred dry wells in a limited field before they bring in a producer; therefore oil men will tell the inquirer that there has really been no adequate oil exploration of Florida's forty million acres of potential oil land.

Actual oil and natural gas have been found in some of these wells. In 1927 J. L. McCord of Oklahoma struck promising sands saturated with crude oil at Monticello, just east of Talla hassee. A year earlier a well at Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast struck natural gas at a depth of 4,010 feet, which burned at the casing head for months. Faulty drilling equipment and technique and failing finances-the Florida real estate boom had just collapsed-caused the abandonment of this project.

The bringing in of the East Texas field in 1928, and of the Louisiana field shortly thereafter, stimulated interest in Florida's oil possibilities. In 1934 William F. Blanchard, an oil engineer with experience in the Pennsylvania fields, called an oil conference at the George Washington Hotel in Jacksonville. Representatives of most of the great oil companies attended and such interest was shown in the assembled data and reports of previous oil explorations that some of the large companies immediately began taking oil leases on Florida lands, all the way from Cape Sable at the southern tip of the peninsula, north to the Georgia line and west to Pensacola. By the Summer of 1937 there were more than 5,000,000 acres of Florida lands under oil leases. At two widely divergent points the most modern scientific apparatus for detecting the presence of subterranean oil formations was being set up, one oil well was being drilled and preparations were under way for two others, using the most up-to-date drilling equipment.

Great encouragement has been given to Florida oil exploration by a revision of its previously expressed opinion by the United States Geological Survey, which had held that Florida was outside of the range of possible oil-bearing sands. In its geological map of oil fields and possible oil fields published in 1934 the Geological Survey included the entire State of Florida as well as an adjoining strip of southern Georgia and Alabama. This was a result, in part, of geological explorations made in the course of the surveys for the Florida cross-state canal.

These and other recent geological discoveries have resulted in the complete abandonment by geologists of the belief long held, first publicly announced by a famous scientist of a century ago, Louis Agassiz, that the Florida peninsula is a coral reef. Scientists now recognize that it is a southerly extension of the Appalachian rock formations, overlaid with water-deposited limestone, and so is geologically identical with the lands to the North and West, in which oil has been found in enormous quantities.

The Gulf Oil Company, in 1937, had leased large acreage in southern Florida, and had begun explorations with the use of the same instruments which had enabled them to locate im portant oil fields in Texas and Louisiana. Another oil company was preparing to drill at Cape Sable, which is in a geological line with the oil and gas developments in Cuba. A third corporation, backed and headed by Mrs. Lucy Cotton Thomas McGraw, had explored several million acres in North Florida with the seismograph and had come to the conclusion, in which many oil engineers and operators agreed, that the country adjacent to the Suwannee River, near Live Oak, offered the most promising outlook for a successful oil development. Meantime, the test well in Lake County was going through geological formations of the type which spell hope to oil operators.

Unless all of the oil geologists are deceiving themselves by thinking that the signs which mean oil in Texas and Louisiana mean the same thing in Florida, there seems to be a reasonable chance that, sooner or later, Florida will strike oil.

From any point in Lake County one may drive in a matter of an hour to Orlando, Florida's sixth city in size, with 30,000 population, county seat of Orange County. The highway runs through an almost continuous scene of citrus groves, for Orange County is second only to Polk County in the production of oranges and grapefruit. The city of Orlando in its downtown business section gives the truthful impression of a busy metropolitan center; in its residential districts that of a charming community of homes set among luxuriant verdure in the midst of green parks and sparkling blue lakes. There are 31 lakes within the city limits of Orlando, which lies only a short distance east of Lake Apopka. It is not surprising, then, to note the frequency along the business streets of signs announcing fishing tackle for sale. One such store in Orlando has developed into a national rendezvous for inland fishermen who gather here not only for trade but to swap fish stories.

Of all of Florida's inland communities Orlando attracts the largest number of winter visitors, and the city and its surroundings have the highest proportion of year 'round residents who came originally from the distinctly northern states. It is less than a forty-mile drive over a broad, smooth highway from Orlando to the beaches of the Atlantic coast, and many persons wintering in Florida who do not care to spend all their time on salt water but enjoy an occasional dip in the ocean, make their headquarters at Orlando, which is one of the most convenient central points from which to explore the entire southern and central part of the peninsula. Numerous major highways from all directions converge here. The city's aviation facilities are such that it calls itself "The Air Capital of Florida."

No other inland city provides such extensive facilities for the entertainment and recreation of winter visitors. In addition to a dozen fine hotels there are cottages and apartment accommodations for 30,000 guests and three large, well-equipped trailer camps.

Orlando is the site of the Central Florida Exposition, held every February and attracting thousands.

The service to tourists given by the Orlando Chamber of Commerce is exceptional. Occupying a large and impressive building in the center of the city, the Chamber of Commerce not only functions as an information bureau for visitors, but has accommodations in its own building for social gatherings, large and small, and a commodious reading room. Sunshine Park, the municipal center of tourist recreation, is equipped with club houses and facilities for almost every kind of outdoor games, while two golf courses are inside the city limits.

Orlando is the headquarters of the Florida Real Estate Commission, charged with the administration of the laws enacted after the speculative real estate boom, to protect the pub lic against unscrupulous practices and misrepresentations by real estate dealers and salesmen. The law, with its successive amendments, is extremely strict in its requirements and penalties. No one may be licensed as a real estate broker or salesman who cannot show a clean record of his business past, whether that was in Florida or elsewhere. Every applicant for a salesman's license has to pass a rigid examination in real estate law and practice, an examination so rigid that more than a third of the applicants fail to pass it at their first attempt.

No pretense, of course, is made that any law can protect people from the consequences of their own bad judgment; but it is the consensus of Florida opinion that the present laws, as administered by the Real Estate Commission, inflict such severe penalties for misrepresentation of any sort on the part of brokers that anyone who buys Florida real estate today has only himself to blame if he is sorry for it afterward. At the height of the speculative boom there were nearly 50,000 real estate salesmen licensed under the tax laws then in force; in 1937 there were fewer than 4,500 who had passed the scrutiny of the Commission and obtained licenses to do business as brokers or salesmen of real estate.

Florida is still interested, very much so, in selling real estate to newcomers. It is not interested in selling lots to people who have no interest in Florida other than the speculative chance of a quick turn-over at a profit; it definitely discourages anything which smacks of the methods and atmosphere of the old boom days. The people who are buying real estate in Florida now, and their number is increasing at a high rate of acceleration, are buying because they intend to live in Florida, all the year or part of the year, to grow oranges and grapefruit or other products of Florida's prolific soil, or merely to take their ease for the remainder of their lives in Florida's kindly and beneficent climate.

As the capital of Orange County and the largest city in Florida's citrus belt, Orlando is the center from which the largest annual volume of citrus fruit is shipped. More than 6,000 carloads of oranges, grapefruit, tangerines and winter vegetables go out of Orlando's freight terminals every year. Orange County is an important truck-farming region as well as citrus country.

Orlando's industries naturally center about and derive from its agricultural interests. All but one of the important marketing organizations which handle Florida farm products from source to ultimate market have their headquarters and maintain their largest packing houses in Orlando. The largest of all the citrus canning plants in the state, that of Dr. Phillips, is located here. It was in this plant that some of the advanced scientific research was done which resulted in the successful commercialization of methods of preserving the citrus surplus and carrying it over the between-season slack.

Adjacent to Orlando on the north is the delightful municipality of Winter Park. It is a beautiful little community surrounding five of Florida's loveliest lakes, an old settled com munity, one of the first of the colonies of northern people, mainly from New England, to be established in Midland Florida. They brought the New England tradition of Congregationalism with them. The first Congregational Church in Florida was established here. Around this nucleus has grown up a community which, in large measure, retains and reflects the atmosphere of New England culture. The azalea gardens and beautiful estates of Winter Park are among the show places of Florida. The town's winter colony includes many prominent authors, its University Club numbers among its members a majority whose names appear in "Who's Who In America." There is a steady growth in the number of winter visitors, for whose accommodation Winter Park has many fine hotels, inns and apartments, and provides a wide variety of outdoor sports, including harness racing.

Winter Park's claim to being the "cultural resort" of Florida rests largely on the atmosphere created and maintained by the influence of Rollins College. Founded in 1885 through the efforts of the Congregationalists of Florida, Rollins College has grown steadily into an institution with a faculty of 85 and a student body of nearly 400. The oldest standard college in Florida, Rollins has no ambition to be the largest. Its 45 acre campus has been laid out to provide, with its present buildings and those planned for the future, for a maximum of 500 students. Since 1925, when Hamilton Holt retired from the editorship of The Independent to become President of Rollins College, the institution has made great strides. While now strictly undenominational the tone of Rollins is still definitely Christian.

President Holt brought to Rollins some radically new ideas in academic education. His first innovation was to discard the standard lecture and quiz system, which he had felt to be inadequate in his own days at Yale and Columbia, and to substitute for it what is known as the "Rollins Conference Plan." This was an attempt, which has worked so successfully in practice as to influence many older institutions, to break down the barriers between the teacher and the taught and, as Dr. Holt puts it, to humanize education. This system accounts for the high proportion of faculty to students, averaging one teacher to four students. It also accounts for the frequency with which visitors to Winter Park notice small groups of a half-a-dozen or so assembled under the trees of the campus or on the shore of Lake Virginia, which borders the college grounds, engaged in conversational discussions which do not bear any outward resemblance to traditional classroom routine.

Another innovation by Dr. Holt was what is called at Rollins the "Achievement Plan for Graduation." Instead of the traditional four annual classes, the student body at Rollins is divided into the Upper Division and the Lower Division. Students advance from the Lower to the Upper not on the basis of credits or time spent, but on their educational achievement, which makes it possible for students to complete courses at a rate of speed in direct proportion to their ability and ambition. This is an effort to individualize the curriculum and, in Dr. Holt's words, to restore the spirit of adventure to higher education.

In some such fashion did the great universities of the Middle Ages function. Something of the spirit which drew eager students, keen in the pursuit of knowledge, to flock by thousands to Salamanca, Paris, Leyden and Oxford, not to pursue set studies by a rigid, prescribed formula but to absorb by direct contact with the learned men of their time the wisdom and knowledge which they taught, seems to permeate the atmosphere of Rollins. The mediaeval method is further suggested by the practice, initiated by Dr. Holt, of bringing to the college every Winter as special lecturers, distinguished men of letters, journalists, educators and men of affairs. Many of these take part in the annual presentations by radio broadcast of the "Animated Magazine," which is in effect a public forum for the discussion of current events and the world's progress.

The architects of Rollins College have been peculiarly successful in adapting the Mediterranean type of architecture to the group of college buildings. Particularly notable is the Knowles Memorial Chapel, designed by Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, the gift of Mrs. Frances Knowles Warren of Boston as a memorial to her father, Francis Knowles, one of the founders of the college and the town. Another is the Annie Russell theatre, a beautiful little playhouse completely equipped for dramatic performances and the headquarters of the college School of Dramatics, which was conducted by the accomplished actress, Miss Annie Russell, until her death in 1936, under an endowment given by Mrs. Edward Bok, who also presented the theatre to the college.

Art, Music, Social Science and Modern Languages are particularly emphasized among the special courses in which Rollins has enlisted the services of famous teachers. It follows that with such a nucleus of culture as this Winter Park has become the Florida home of large numbers of authors, painters, musicians and of non-professional people whose tastes and interests lie in those cultural ranges.

It is worth the tourist's while to run twenty miles south from Orlando for a quick visit to Kissimmee, the county seat of Osceola County. This old town was the headquarters of the Disston syndicate, from which their 4,000,000-acre purchase of Florida lands in 1881 was managed.

For a time it appeared that this, rather than Orlando, would be the central Florida metropolis. It was the terminal of the railroad when it was first extended southward from Sanford. Boats plying the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee carried settlers and supplies and brought back to the railroad products from the forests and pasture land. Cane fields flourished on East Lake Tohopekaliga, rice fields were green on Fish Lake, peaches, bananas and other tropical fruits added to the prosperity of the county. A million dollar sugar mill was constructed in what is now St. Cloud and a three-story rice mill had a prominent spot on the Kissimmee skyline. About the turn of the century, following the death of Hamilton Disston, his associates withdrew from this part of the county and most of the enterprises which they had fostered were allowed to disintegrate and disappear. Kissimmee remained, and so did the pasture lands and the forests.

In 1909 a group of promoters founded the city of St. Cloud as a colony of Civil War veterans. This has grown to be an attractive and progressive city which is possibly more northern in its atmosphere and population than almost any other community in the State. As the veterans of 1865 have passed from the scene their sons of '98 and the grandsons of '17 have moved in to take their places, so that St. Cloud now has a population of approximately 2,000.

Osceola County is one of the leaders in the better beef cattle movement. On the thousands of acres of well-drained pasture land within the county more than 50,000 head are grazed. The Florida pioneer in the improvement of the beef strain is Henry O. Partin of Kissimmee, of the fourth generation of a family of cattlemen who have been breeding livestock in Florida for a century. Mr. Partin was the first to import Brahma bulls, the big, humpbacked sires of the breed of the "sacred cows" of India. He is now the largest breeder of this strain. Sires from the Partin herd play an important part in the grading up of range stock all the way from the Matanzas Inlet to the Peace River and beyond. Through the cattle industry new prosperity has come to Osceola county. Tens of thousands of acres of what was unproductive prairie, much of it abandoned by its former owners and sold for delinquent taxes, have been bought and fenced for cattle pasturage. The day of the free range is over. Besides the old cattle families of this region, the Johnsons, Johnstons, Donegans, Overstreets and Basses, new investors from the North are getting into the cattle business. One of these, N. Roy Carroll, a Cleveland, Ohio, financier, has 20,000 acres in his Carrollton Ranch.

Lumber is one of Osceola county's important industries, with annual payrolls of around half a million dollars, while the shipping of fresh-water fish to northern markets brings another quarter-million or so into the county. The fish are shipped in canvas bags suspended inside of barrels, which are packed with ice. Motor trucks carry the barreled bass and catfish to Topeka, Oklahoma City, Toledo and Davenport, Iowa, the principal markets.

Fishing for sport is one of the district's winter attractions luring hundreds of visitors. The average weight of Osceola County black bass is said to be six pounds; the record, sixteen pounds, two ounces. Fishing camps, guides and boats are always accessible.

Returning from Kissimmee through Orlando again, it is a short drive northward to Sanford, at the head of navigation on the St. Johns River. Sanford is the capital of the world-famous region known as "The Celery Delta." But before we reach it, suppose we turn off the highway, between Lake Mary and Longwood, to look at the oldest living object in the United States and the largest east of California. This is the Giant Cypress.

This great tree stands where it has stood for 3,500 years. That is the estimate foresters make of the age of this largest known specimen of "The Wood Eternal." The only tree in North America that is known to be older stands in Mexico. Five hundred years before Homer wrote the Iliad, more than 1',500 years before the birth of Christ, three thousand years and more before Columbus discovered America, this huge tree has stood. It has reached a diameter of 17Y2 feet. It may once have towered to a height of 300 feet, but its upper central branches were shattered by lightning in some prehistoric age, and its total height now is but 125 feet. A lightning rod guards it against future thunderbolts. The great tree and the land immediately surrounding it have been taken over by the county and designated as a public park, with provisions for its preservation against vandalism and forest fire.

Here in Seminole County we are still surrounded on all sides by citrus groves, but the great crop of this region is celery. From the 5,000 acres of celery fields lying in the tri angle enclosed by the lakes which form the headwaters of the St. Johns River, the annual yield of celery averages close to 2,000,000 crates, bringing into the district in hard cash from $3,000,000 a year upward, nearly half of which represents a clear profit to the growers and marketing agencies. The Sanford growers have developed celery culture to the peak of scientific perfection. Their methods have been adopted wherever celery is grown. Most of the hazards of celery cultivation have been eliminated through years of research and practical experience.

Celery growing is, in effect, a year-'round agricultural operation, requiring the investment of a large amount of capital to produce large returns. In addition to the cost of the land, which in this favored section may easily run to $500 an acre, including drainage canals and ditches, there is another $250 an acre or so to be invested in the necessary system of sub-irrigation, by which the water from flowing artesian wells is supplied to the growing plants in precisely regulated quantities. Fertilization for celery is expensive, but attempts at economy in the use of fertilizer usually result in a net loss on the season's operation. Preparation of the seed bed begins in July, a measured area being sown daily for several weeks. In September transplantation of the young celery plants begins, proceeding on a planned time schedule so that the crop will come to maturity not all at once but day by day, enabling cutting and shipping to be planned to feed the celery into the market in a steady flow over a period of months, instead of having it all dumped at one time, with a resulting break in the price. As the celery stalks approach cutting time they are protected by the application of bleaching paper, applied vertically in long strips down both sides of each row, but tucked around each bunch of celery so as to keep the sun from reaching any part of the plant except the projecting upper leaves. Sunlight develops chlorophyll, the mysterious agent which turns growing things green, and celery eaters want their celery stalks white. Cutting and shipping celery begins in the Sanford district between Thanksgiving and Christmas and continues until June. In these seven months more than 5,500 carloads of celery roll northward out of Sanford.

It is 200 miles down the St. Johns River northward to Jacksonville. For many years the Clyde Line operated a passenger and express steamboat service on the river between these two points. It was abandoned partly because it seemed no longer profitable and partly because of the difficulties of navigation created by the pest of Florida's fresh waters, the water hyacinth. This beautiful flower, whose purple blossoms and green leaves, spreading over and often completely covering the surface of streams and lakes, are greatly admired by tourists, constitutes a perennial and costly problem for which Florida has not yet found a practical solution.

This pestiferous vegetation was first introduced into Florida as a decorative plant, from its native habitat in Brazil. So long as it propagated only in the land-locked lake in which it was originally cultivated it did no harm; but in a flood season the hyacinths were washed out of the lake and scattered among the waterways of all Southeast Florida. They quickly increased and multiplied until by the time of the World War they had become so wide-spread as almost to preclude the navigation by small boats of many of Florida's most popular streams, and before long they were even obstructing the channels and impairing the fishing in the larger rivers and lakes of Central and Southern Florida.

The water hyacinth germinates from seeds at the bottom of shallow fresh water ponds or sluggish streams. As soon as the young plants have developed the air sacs, like tiny green balloons, the roots come away and the whole plant rises to the surface, where the air sacs keep it afloat, and its leaves and blossoms develop. It gets its sustenance entirely from the water. Immensely prolific, it multiplies so rapidly that many instances are recorded of wide streams and good-sized lakes being so thickly covered with the water hyacinth that it was possible for a man to walk across them merely by laying a ten-foot board on top of the floating hyacinths, the sustaining power of the plants' air sacs preventing him from sinking. Boat propellers quickly become fouled by the hyacinth; few canoeists care to undertake paddling through hyacinth-infested waters.

The floating plants are carried down by the current. If they reach salt water or even water that is moderately brackish they quickly die; but enough of them come to maturity in fresh water to drop their seeds where they will grow a new and bigger crop for the next season. Most of the communities in Florida fronting on fresh water lakes have to maintain crews of workmen whose job it is, by means of rake-like tools, to keep the waters free from the hyacinth. Numerous devices for the wholesale reaping of the hyacinth crop have been devised, but the most effective method is the use of horse-drawn harrow-like devices, which many farmers use, spreading the hyacinth over the land, where it has a considerable fertilizing value as it decomposes.

Poisonous sprays are effective against the water hyacinth, and there is no question that the pest could be exterminated by their use. The difficulty here is that Florida cattle are very fond of the water hyacinth in its green state, and will stand shoulder-deep in the shallow waters where it grows, to eat it. Since the cattle men who pasture their herds on unfenced land have been able to block every attempt at compulsory fencing laws, there is no way to keep cattle from eating the hyacinth in most of Florida's streams and lakes, and the poison which kills the hyacinth also kills cattle. Therefore the state has not been able to put into effect the one method of exterminating the water hyacinth which has been proved successful by tests.

In spite of the difficulty of navigation caused by the water hyacinth, some enterprising young business men undertook in 1933 to revive cargo traffic on the St. Johns River. Using craft especially built for the purpose, Diesel-engined, shallow draft, broad of beam and sharp at the bow, this Jacksonville Sanford freight line has built up a carrying trade which covers all of central Florida by truck connections at Sanford, distributing merchandise from Jacksonville as far west as Tampa and as far south as Miami, and bringing back to Jacksonville shipments of citrus, celery and other products of South and Central Florida. One of Sanford's local prides is that General U. S. Grant, when President, turned the first spadeful of earth for the town's first railroad connecting Sanford with Tampa.

In and around Sanford there is an increasing influx of tourists and winter visitors, who find relaxation amid the restful surroundings of the Seminole County countryside.

The St. Johns River is fresh water all the way down to Palatka, 55 miles south of Jacksonville. One of the oldest communities in the state, Palatka is of special importance as the site of the largest cypress lumber mill in the world. The casual tourist around Florida can distinguish a cypress sawmill from a pine sawmill by the quantity of finished lumber piled up in the yards. It takes three years for cypress to season sufficiently for shipment. Once seasoned it lasts almost forever. When the great cypress doors of St. Peters in Rome were taken down after 1500 years of exposure to the weather they were found to be still in good condition.

Palatka is the center, too, of a wide area on both sides of the St. Johns River in which numerous old settlements, surrounded by old but still producing orange groves, furnish the winter homes of families who have been coming to this part of Florida annually for generations. Not far from Palatka are the Penney Farms, a philanthropic establishment endowed by James Cash Penney, the chain store magnate, as a place of refuge and retirement for superannuated Protestant ministers and their wives. The venerable parsons sink their denominational differences and live in peace and comfort, each in his own independent apartment or cottage, and thoroughly enjoy each other's society.

The city is the trading center for the Hastings Irish potato district. At East Palatka is a unique Florida industry, a cannery for Irish potatoes.

Near Palatka, on the road to Jacksonville, is a winter resort, Green Cove Springs, whose popularity goes back to the days before the Civil War. Its center of attraction is a flow ing spring of pure water which has been developed for swimming and in connection with which a hydrotherapic institution is operated.

Palatka's particular pride is its municipal azalea garden.

Although Palatka is recognized as one of the industrial centers of Florida, since 1932 it has taken its place as the site of one of the greatest tourist attractions in the state, the Ravine Gardens, where grow the largest single collection of azaleas in the world on public display. In a unique Florida setting of natural ravines eroded to a maximum depth of 120 feet by springs which flow from the hillsides, there are interspersed with magnolias, hickory, dogwood, live-oak, pine and bay, more than 105,000 azaleas, ranging from pure white to deep crimson, forming a blanket of color along the sides of the ravines while more than 2,000 Japanese magnolias, 11,000 palms and over 200,000 other tropical plants add to the beauty of the scene. A five mile winding drive encircles the 85 acres, with seven and a half miles of foot paths.