When pineapple was king

BY CAMILLE S. YATES

Long before it became world-famous for the citrus it produced, the Indian River region was known for producing pineapples. At the turn of the 20th century, thousands of acres along the sandy ridge of the river from Vero Beach to Sewall’s Point were covered in pineapple.

Pineapples were so plentiful that in 1895 Jensen Beach became known as the Pineapple Capital of the World. Besides endless acres of pineapple plants, there were pineapple packinghouses, pineapple canning factories, pineapple elixirs and postcards of pineapples celebrating the region’s cultivation of the succulent fruit.

The sandy well-drained soil that runs along the river is ideal for cultivating pineapples. They are not native to Florida and were first discovered in the New World in 1493 in Guadeloupe, Antilles, by Columbus during his second voyage.

INDEPENDENT FORTUNE

The first written evidence of pineapple farming on what is now known as the Treasure Coast goes back to 1845, when settler Caleb Drayton took stock of his crops in a letter. According to researchers Edward Caleb Choker and Daniel L. Schaefer, writing in the Florida Historical Quarterly in 1992, Drayton grew the crops south of the site of the original Fort Pierce and wrote to his wife, who was living in Augusta, Ga.:

There are Pine Apples here now bearing, & if there is anything that looks beautiful it is them. I have just obtained 38 & have 30 Bananas which will give me by fall more than two hundred. I shall have considerable fruit another year, & from the plants I now have, shall be able to obtain more than 1,000 in a year from this time, & 5,000 the year following, & 25,000 the next — 50,000 is a large plantation of them. 200 Orange trees, 100 lemon, 50,000 bananas & 50,000 Pine Apples are an independent fortune to any man, & there is no difficulty in having them, besides many other valuable fruits, such as Citron, Tamarind, Lime, Guava, Custard apple etc.

While farmers such as Drayton had moderate success, pineapple production didn’t take off until 1879 when Capt. Thomas E. Richards homesteaded property on a high bluff overlooking the Indian River 13 miles south of Fort Pierce and named it Eden.

“My great-grandfather brought his family from Newark, New Jersey,” says Richards’ great-granddaughter, Mary L. Simon of Jensen Beach. “His daughter, Lucie, kept a decent log on things that happened in Florida. Her mother, Rebecca, was not happy about the family’s move to Florida, and she stayed in Newark, while her husband, Capt. Richards, homesteaded a large tract of land on the shores of the Indian River.”

Simon was born in a house that Richards built on Indian River Drive, which is still occupied by Simon’s cousin. Richards first built the Eden Grove House for his wife, which eventually became the Eden Grove Hotel where visitors would enjoy the lovely winter climate that Florida had to offer. The structure remained standing until it burned to the ground in 1986.

MAINLAND SUCCESS

Richards sailed to the Keys for his pineapple slips — the leafy part at the top of the fruit that is removed for cultivating — and planted most of them on Hutchinson Island, with a few around his home on the mainland. The ones on Hutchinson Island died while the mainland plants thrived.

Richards ultimately acquired two miles along the river and several years later had the largest pineapple plantation on the Indian River. The fruit was packed in barrels or boxes at the plantation’s packing house, loaded onto river boats, and transported to the southern terminus of the railroad in Titusville.

Richards had a novel process for getting the pineapples aboard schooners. A dock from his home extended 1,500 feet into the Indian River and had a tram that carried the pineapples down the dock. Wrote historian Lucille Rights in her “Portrait of St. Lucie County”:

“Tram cars loaded with pines would roll down on narrow rails to the river boats. The captain installed a sail on the tram, letting the reliable easterly winds power the tram, now loaded with people or supplies, back up to the land.”

The shipping method changed in 1894, when Henry M. Flagler’s railroad arrived in Fort Pierce and the growers could load their fruit directly onto the freight cars.

NEW WARNING

Mariel Coleane Minton, the great-granddaughter of a pineapple farmer, said the trains performed an important service to farmers. “Before the railroad, farmers had no warning of an impending storm or freeze,” she says. “When the train came alongside our family’s plantation, they would honk the horn a certain number of times and that would warn the farmers of a freeze or a storm.” Once the railroad came in, the family moved their packing sheds close to the railroad.

Minton’s great-grandfather, Elon Eldred, moved from Greene County, Ill., in 1879 to grow pineapples along the Indian River between what is Midway Road and Palms Cemetery. The area remains known as Eldred. “My great-grandfather had a large farm in Illinois, but he wanted to escape the cold,” Minton explains. “My grandparents, Julia Eldred Thomas and Hal Thomas had just gotten married when Julia’s father, Elon, summoned them to Florida. What a culture shock for them. They left a large farm to come to the wilds of Florida.”

Minton owns the family home, built in 1893, named Eldred House. On a wall in the home is a framed copy of a deed dated 1890 giving the county, which was then Brevard, 13 ½ acres to build Indian River Drive. “My family had people from Nassau, Bahamas, here to tend the pineapple plantation and pick the fruit when it was ripe,” Minton says. “They lived in back of the family home.”

PINEAPPLE CAPITAL

Farther south, Denmark native John Laurence Jensen arrived from West Virginia in 1881 and began clearing the land for pineapples in the community that would later bear his name, Jensen Beach. With the extension of the railroad, which could carry the crop quickly to the northern market, growers had begun shipping more than 1 million boxes per year from Jensen Beach. By 1895, it became known as the Pineapple Capital of the Word.

In her book “Historic Jensen and Eden of Florida’s Indian River” Sandra Thurlow documents accounts of many families who settled in the area and began growing pineapples.

“The once exotic pineapple was to become commonplace for those who settled on the south east coast of Florida during the late 1800s,” she writes. “Rattons, suckers and slips, terms for the parts of the pineapple plant used for propagation, became household terms. Names of varieties such as Red Spanish, Abakka, Smooth Cayenne became as familiar as a friend’s surname.”

YELLOW FLAG

Moving farther north along the Indian River, Gail Hallstrom Flesche’s family emigrated from Sweden and settled in what is now Indian River County to grow pineapples near Oslo Road. Flesche’s great-uncle, Axel Hallstrom, a horticulturist, and her grandfather, Nels Hallstrom, started the Hallstrom Farmstead along Old Dixie Highway. Axel Hallstrom left Sweden in 1893, first settling in Berlin and London before immigrating to the United States.

Glowing reports from fellow Scandinavians in the Oslo and Viking [now known as Indrio] settlements inspired him to try his hand at agriculture. In 1904, he moved to Florida and for $35 an acre bought land in Viking close to where the Hillcrest Memorial Gardens is today. This is where Hallstrom began his first pineapple plantation.

He sold the Viking property to R.N. “Pop” Koblegard in 1890 and bought land several miles north in Oslo for $50 an acre. He established his permanent home on this land along Old Dixie Highway.

“My dad walked to Indrio School,” Flesche says. “At the end of the day, he had to go and pick pineapples. He spent a lot of time in the fields. The railroad ran right along Old Dixie Highway, where the farm was. They would take crates full of pineapples to the railroad and hang out a yellow flag. This meant that the rail cars should stop to pick up a delivery of pineapples. They were shipped to Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.”

But freezes, nematodes and competition from Hawaii, where Jim Dole founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Co. in 1901, challenged Florida’s supremacy in pineapple production.

Despite these threats, the pineapple industry remained dominant in the Indian Riverland, according to this 1910 account by Winthrop Packard in his book “Florida Trails”:

This is a country of pineapple plantations. They cover the ridge next to the Indian River, clothing it in prickly green lances from the river banks to the savanna behind it, for miles on miles, running north and south. In places these are under sheds, acres in extent. In others the wide lagoon of water on the west protected them and they are but little harmed. In others the full blight of the cold has worked in them and their green lances have turned a sickly, straw yellow. On such fields the crops for this year is ruined, and many acres of newly set young plants are killed to the root. Thus does winter set his mark occasionally even on this semi-tropic land.”

INDUSTRY’S DEMISE

The Hallstrom pineapple crop, like many others, was wiped out by a several-day freeze in late 1916 and early 1917. At the time, Axel Hallstrom had been experimenting with citrus sour orange root stock in a nursery. After the pineapple crop was lost, he turned his attention to citrus, becoming a successful grower and helping to start the Florida Citrus League in 1921.

Nature wasn’t the only factor that led to the demise of Florida’s pineapple crop. While the railroad at first was a boon to pineapple industry, it also played a role in its demise. When the railroad reached the Keys, it enabled cheaper imported Cuban pineapples to flood the U.S. market.

These imports combined with frequent freezes and persistent disease caused the collapse of the pineapple trade. Citrus and cattle would soon become the region’s agricultural engine.