Chilly reminder of 1894-1895 freeze

These scenes from the 1894-1895 freeze are from a
NOAA-Preserve America Initiative fact sheet. 
Cold temperatures and ice caused the damage.

The same weekend Jonas blew through the Northeast, we dropped below freezing for the first time this winter. My weather app reported 30 degrees at about 8 a.m. Jan. 24, 2016. No snow, but for Floridians, a crisis of cold. We never got out of the 40s that day.

The cold snap was too short to do damage. But when I ventured outdoors - briefly - into a frosty 32 degrees the weather app said felt like 26,  I was reminded of the catastrophic and legendary 1894-1895 freeze. 

I scurried back into the warmth of central heating. There was no such thing back in the day. Cold outdoors equalled cold indoors, offset by inefficient fireplaces or wood-burning stoves whose warmth rarely reached bedrooms. 

The Big Freeze was what a Florida Citrus Mutual timeline calls an "impact freeze" because its severity caused serious economic damage and also rearranged the state's citrus industry. A Dec. 29-30, 1894 freeze was followed by unusual warmth, and then another hard freeze Feb. 7-9, 1895. 

Vintage photos of the aftermath are in the archives of cities and organizations scattered across Florida. The Rollins College Archives includes this photo in a blog post titled, "Rollins Reminiscences." All the oranges littering the ground represented lost income. In just one example of what happened statewide, the blog post relates how the freeze wiped out the college's endowment. The post also includes a British tourist's recollections of the orange trees turning black and the fruits turning into "lumps of yellow ice."

In both December and February, temperatures in Jacksonville dropped to 14 and winds blew at up to 35 mph. In Orlando, near where the Rollins photo was taken, temperatures dipped to 18 and 19. Those stats are from an interesting, online U.S. Department of Agriculture 1896 report written soon after the back-to-back disasters. 

The report also states that 3 million boxes of oranges and lemons were destroyed in the 1894 freeze, and the trees themselves were lost a few months later. The paper goes into great horticultural and meteorological detail, and is definitely worth a look if you're interested in that type of historical information. (2021 update: Unfortunately, the report no longer seems to be available online.)

Me, I'll be reading it in the warmth of indoors.

Rollins College photo of 1894-1895 freeze damage. 

Lue Gim Gong: past, present

Thanks to Florida Memory for this image
of Lue Gim Gong tending his citrus in DeLand.

Lue Gim Gong is probably one of the most gifted horticulturists you've never heard of.  He was both lauded and derided in his day - late 1800s to early 1900s. Lauded for his botanical prowess, derided for his ethnicity and his eccentricity. Today he is just mostly forgotten - but not in DeLand, where he developed the award-winning Lue Gim Gong orange.

The Chinese immigrant is on my mind because of recent action at the West Volusia Historical Society. The organization's Heritage Gardening Group is launching an effort to save extant Lue Gim Gong orange trees from citrus greening. I'm a member of that group, and excited about the project.

A recent generation of Lue Gim Gong trees grow on the grounds of the society's museum complex. Cuttings from aged trees were budded onto rootstock and planted in a small grove that frames a gazebo. A bronze bust of Lue is displayed in the gazebo. A mural of Lue is also featured in downtown DeLand.

I wonder how Lue would approach the greening menace. For sure, he'd be focused on developing a resistant variety. I like to think he'd be successful. Even Lue's detractors acknowledged his horticultural ability, although they took pains to denigrate his orange variety into oblivion.

The Lue Gim Gong orange was noted for its cold-hardiness and for holding its crop on the tree. Lue bred the variety by cross-pollinating Hart's Late and Mediterranean Sweet oranges.

The Lue Gim Gong orange was so outstanding it won a national industry award in 1911. Lue died in 1925. His orange also died, in a sense. It was dismissed as insignificant - a minor seedling of the more famous Valencia orange. (The once-named Hart's Late is now considered to have been the Valencia.)

I can't help but question the long-ago campaign to discredit Lue's work. The references I have seen, that label his citrus variety as minor, aren't attributed to a specific scientist or academic study. It's true Valencia holds its oranges on the tree, and is resistant to cold. But Lue's tree - the supporting structure itself - is said to have been far more cold-hardy than any other citrus tree. People clamored for Lue Gim Gong trees in the early 1900s. The trees were distributed by Glen Saint Mary Nursery, except for the many Lue was said to have given away.

The few accounts that remain describe Lue as brilliant, gentle, loyal to his mentor but distant with her siblings, devoted to his pets (two horses and a rooster), and a devout Christian with Confucianist roots. Legend says that, after his death, stacks of uncashed checks were found in the DeLand house he inherited from his mentor and mother-figure, Fannie Burlingame. She, by the way, is worth a blog post of her own.

Lue died penniless, and nearly friendless but for a few neighbors and townsfolk brave enough to challenge their era's bigotries. His horticultural records and journals disappeared. The least we can do is save his trees.

Learn more about Lue Gim Gong. He's worth it.

Brief Wikipedia entry
USDA blog post about Lue
Wooden Fish Songs, a novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn, based on Lue's life
Gift of the Unicorn, a Young Readers Series biography by Virginia Aronson
Orange County Regional History Center page about Lue





 Lue Gim Gong
in 1920. (Photo credit:
Stetson University)