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Florida - In The Indian River Country

( Originally Published Mid 1930's )

Leaving Volusia County behind us, but carrying the picture of a typical Florida region which it showed us as characteristic of the major phases of life and activity throughout most of the peninsula, we need make but a few brief stops on our way down the East Coast, to get an impression of the outstanding things which make one community different from another.

From New Smyrna U. S. Highway No. 1 leads us through a succession of small coast towns, through Titusville at the head of the Indian River to Cocoa, the metropolis of the Indian River country, although Melbourne, further south, may dispute that title. Its oranges, grown on Merritt Island and for 150 miles along the coast of the mainland, on a narrow strip of hammock soil which stretches from New Smyrna almost down to Palm Beach, have given the Indian River an international reputation. The river itself, a part of the intra-coastal waterway, is a long, narrow sound between Merritt Island and the mainland, bridged at Titusville, Cocoa, Eau Gallie and Melbourne.

Merritt Island is a geological freak. Instead of being pure sand, as most of the keys on the Florida coast are, it is a high, fertile, hardwood hammock, itself protected against the ocean by an outlying key, Cape Canaveral, with a wide watercourse, the Banana River, lying between Canaveral and Merritt Island. Who first discovered that the soil of Merritt Island would produce a finer quality of oranges than any other part of Florida history does not relate. It was a discovery made very early in Florida's history. Many of the groves and plantations on Merritt Island date back to colonial times, and there are remains of ancient structures which appear to have been built during the Spanish occupation. Merritt Island oranges and grapefruit command a premium above the regular market price of from fifty cents to a dollar and a half a box. Many Merritt Island groves have been in the same family for generations and are still supporting their owners in comfortable wealth.

The town of Cocoa, on the mainland, together with its adjoining community, Rockledge, is an increasingly popular winter resort. It is a center for both commercial fisheries and game fishing. An important and interesting industry here is the packing and shipping of both fresh and canned crab meat, of which the Indian River is the nation's principal source of supply. One of the finest yacht basins on the intra-coastal waterway is maintained here by the municipality of Cocoa.

Melbourne, the attractive little seacoast town at the mouth of the Indian River, is the eastern terminus of the principal cross-state highway running from Tampa through the ridge country to the Atlantic.

Southward the shore highway passes through the same belt of Indian River citrus fruits, with a rich agricultural background, to Vero Beach, county seat of Indian River county. The Spanish settlers and their early English successors planted sugar cane throughout this region. Now, while sugar cane is grown for syrup as a farm field crop in many parts of Florida, its product becomes sugar at only two points in the state, one of them at Fellsmere, in the back country of Indian River County, near Lake Wilmington, where a 2,000-acre sugar plantation keeps in operation a sugar mill and the only sugar refinery in Florida. The much larger commercial sugar plantation and mill at Clewiston has no refinery attached.

The city of Vero Beach, like most Florida cities, spreads over the countryside so widely that, outside of its business center, it seems like a rural or semi-suburban community, with orange groves surrounding many of the residences. It stretches across the Indian River to the outlying key with a well-developed ocean beach and attractive ocean-front homes and hotels. The tourist industry is an important one here, as everywhere. Vero Beach boasts that it is the smallest city in the United States having regular air passenger transport and air mail service. It has a population of 3,200.

Among the winter colonists who have built beautiful and luxurious homes here on the beach front are many of America's widely-known business and industrial leaders, constituting with their families and guests a fashionable nucleus comparable with Palm Beach. Worth the tourist's while is a visit to the ocean front of Vero Beach if for no other reason than to see the unique beach club which Waldo Sexton has built of driftwood and planks hewn from old cypress logs. Mr. Sexton is also responsible for McKee Jungle Gardens, a few miles south of Vero Beach, where a natural jungle of eighty acres has been developed, by the addition of hundreds of varieties of tropical trees and plants and the importation of rare curios, to make one of the most interesting show places in Florida.

Passing through the attractive little resort town of Indrio, one comes to the city and seaport of Fort Pierce. We are here still in the Indian River citrus belt, but we are closer than we have been to the great citrus groves of the interior and to the broad agricultural truck garden tracts lying around Lake Okeechobee, with splendid highways leading from the interior to the sea at Fort Pierce.

Long an important railway shipping point for the products of groves and farms over a radius of 100 miles or so, and one of the most important centers of commercial fishery on the East Coast, Fort Pierce determined to become a full-sized seaport back in the 1920's. With the aid of private capital subscribed and raised by local citizens, the inlet from the Atlantic to the Indian River, which had served as a channel for fishing boats, was enlarged and deepened. In February, 1930, the Port of Fort Pierce was opened to deep-water traffic, with the inauguration of regular steamship service to northern ports.

Proof that their enterprise had met a widespread demand came to the people of Fort Pierce when the pressure upon the port's warehouse and dock facilities necessitated enlargement within two years. In 1933 the Federal government appropriated $250,000 to widen and deepen the channel from the sea and $50,000 a year for the maintenance of the channel and harbor at a depth of twenty-five feet. The port's facilities include a huge refrigerating warehouse with a capacity for precooling the equivalent of 600 carloads of citrus fruit per week, and cold-storage for 200 carloads. Refrigerator ships make five regular departures a week from Fort Pierce to northern ports. Shipments by water of oranges and grapefruit alone, in the 1936-37 season, amounted to more than 100,000 tons, saving to the growers approximately $250,000 which otherwise they would have had to pay in railroad freights.

Lumber, from mills cutting pine forests in the nearby territory, green vegetables and food fish, largely Spanish mackerel and mullet, make up the major part of Fort Pierce's outbound shipments, while inbound cargoes bring general merchandise from American ports, cement from Belgium, sugar-beet pulp from Denmark and oil and gasoline from Gulf of Mexico ports for storage in huge distribution tanks.

Fort Pierce, while not depending upon tourists and winter visitors for its major income, welcomes them gladly and provides for them facilities for recreation such as all Florida provides and which hardly need to be re-enumerated, with rather special emphasis upon deep-sea fishing. For yachtsmen passing through the intra-coastal waterway the city provides a municipally-owned yacht basin. One gets the impression that Fort Pierce is a trifle more interested in the prospective permanent settler, especially one who contemplates going into fruit growing or any other phase of agriculture.

We are getting down now into the semi-tropical part of Florida, where agriculture takes on some aspects unknown farther north in the state. This is the region in which pine apples were once a large and highly profitable crop. The first pineapples grown in Florida were on the shallow soil of the southern keys, which soon became exhausted. They were introduced there in 1860. In the 1870's, after unsuccessful attempts to grow pineapples farther north, planters found that they would thrive between Vero and Stuart, and thousands of acres were planted, with Fort Pierce as the shipping point, when the Florida East Coast Railroad penetrated this region. For years the shipment of pineapples from May 15 to July 10 required a daily solid train of fifty to seventy freight cars, leaving Fort Pierce at eleven o'clock every night and carrying, in the short shipping season, as high as a million crates a year, representing a profit to the growers of from one dollar to three dollars a crate.

This prosperous industry was ruined by the competition from the Isle of Pines and Cuba, especially after the East Coast Railroad had extended its lines to Key West and established its car-ferry between Key West and Havana. Much bitter criticism has been levied at the railroad for giving, as is often charged, preferential through rates to foreign pineapples, enabling them to be laid down in the New York market at prices with which the Florida growers could not compete. That and the competition of Hawaiian pineapples free of duty after the annexation of Hawaii to the United States, practically put an end to the Florida pineapple industry, for many years. Since 1936, however, with changed conditions, the old pineapple region of Florida surrounding Fort Pierce has been looking, somewhat wistfully, toward a revival of pineapple growing. The State College of Agriculture has been experimenting with a new and allegedly superior variety of pineapple, better adapted than its predecessors to Florida's soil and climate, and active promotion of pineapple farming got well under way in 1937.

It is by promotion at the hands of developers who have agricultural land to sell that most of Florida's products have been introduced and established. It has been well demonstrated in the past that Florida can grow pineapples with little trouble and on a large commercial scale. It still remains to be seen whether it can be done profitably under present conditions. At any rate, Fort Pierce is watching the new development with great interest, in the hope of adding another kind of freight to its port output, and with the assurance to the new pineapple growers that this time there will be no discrimination against them in freight rates.

Fort Pierce takes particular pride in the success of its mosquito eradication campaign, which was begun in 1925 and has changed Fort Pierce and St. Lucie County from their former unenviable reputation of being the worst mosquito-ridden section of Florida to the least infected. This has been accomplished by the St. Lucie County Sanitary District Commissioners in less than ten years and at a cost of only about $100,000.

The system, which is fundamentally that which has been put into practice all over Florida, is one of narrow ditches connected with rivers and drainage canals so as to effectively drain off all standing water, and the introduction into the canals and ditches of the tropical Gambusia minnow, a native of the fresh waters of southern Florida, whose principal food is the larvae of the mosquito. So efficiently do these tiny fish frustrate the efforts of the mosquito to increase and multiply that the claim is set up that the pest is at last under better control, even in this once mosquito-ridden district, than in the New Jersey salt marshes, where surface oiling still has to be resorted to, at the height of the mosquito season.

Three hundred miles of mosquito ditches criss-cross the island or Atlantic side of Fort Pierce, lying east of the Indian River, as well as the back country of St. Lucie County, supple menting the drainage canals of the North St. Lucie River and Fort Pierce Farms drainage districts. These rural drainage systems cover nearly 100,000 acres and comprise nearly 400 miles of main canals and laterals, so planned that every forty-acre tract in either district can drain off its surplus rainfall by means of a simple farm ditch, while a system of dykes prevents the flooding of low-lying land. This drainage system, together with the elimination of the mosquito, has made possible the opening up of many thousands of acres of previously undeveloped agricultural lands.

With its agricultural background and the growing commerce of its port, Fort Pierce is naturally more interested in manufacturing industries than if it were primarily a resort city. That is not to suggest that Fort Pierce is not a good place to spend a Florida winter. It is one of the best, as the presence of the hundreds of yachts, which tie up every season in its fine new yacht basin, the many attractive winter homes along its Indian River drive and other outlying avenues, and the pressure every winter upon its hotels for tourist accommodations, testify. But there is a sense of underlying economic stability about Fort Pierce, a stability which would endure if vacationists suddenly ceased coming to Florida. Somewhat of that stability is suggested by the fact that the St. Lucie County bank, in Fort Pierce, is one of the only two banks between Jacksonville and Miami which survived both the Florida boom of the middle 20's and its subsequent crash, and the bank panic of 1932-33.

Industrially Fort Pierce lays particular stress upon its fertilizer factory, which specializes in manufacturing special fertilizers to chemical formulas adapted to particular soils and crops, and which maintains a staff of chemists to make individual soil analyses for farmers. Canneries putting up grapefruit products and vegetables, an optical laboratory serving opticians in all parts of the state especially on prescription work; a bakery whose products are distributed as far north as St. Augustine, south to Miami and west to the Gulf; an ice manufacturing plant which turns out one hundred tons a day to supply the refrigeration needs of shippers of fruit, vegetables, fish and shrimp, with saw mills, boat building plants, battery factories and barrel factories are among the more important and active of Fort Pierce's industries.

The city had a population by the State Census of 1935 of 6,376, being two-thirds of the population of the entire county, which includes only six other post offices.