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. 

Reading between the lines - or fruits

Ready for dinner on Christmas Day 1885. Is the
 decor tasteful or showy? It can be hard to tell.
 (Credit: State Archives of  Florida)

The type of natural Christmas decorations I wrote about in my last post are displayed nicely in this 1885 image from the State Archives of Florida. What I can't figure is how the decorators managed to secure the palm fronds to the walls. If anyone has an idea, leave a comment.

This picture depicts a Christmas dinner at what is labeled on the Florida Memory website as a "restaurant or club" in DeLand. I've seen this photo before, though, and it shows the Putnam Inn.

DeLand in 1885 had some notable boarding houses, and the Putnam Inn was one of the them. Others included the Parce Land Hotel and the Grove House. Another photo on the Florida Memory site shows the same room, set for dinner, but without the wait staff and centerpiece display. It clearly states that the image is of the dining room of the Putnam House (the hotel's later name) on Dec. 25, 1885.

The mystery (to me, anyway) is the condition of the palm-frond decorations. They are decidedly droopier in the image identified as the Putnam and dated Dec. 25.

I share the photograph now - a few days after Christmas - for two reasons:

1. The 12 Days of Christmas begin Dec. 25, they don't end on that day. So it's still Christmas, in my book. (When I was a child, we didn't decorate our tree until Dec. 24, a tradition that generated much youthful whining.)
2. People who dined out in 1885 Florida had more disposable income than the average pioneer family. The diners were often winter residents, and some were fairly wealthy. Yet there isn't anything really fancy about the dining room. The decorations aren't lavish. The table decor is notable only for the fanned napkins. The scene, overall, leads me to think people back then didn't expect over-the-top everything as many do today.

I'll now argue against my notion in Number 2, because of the fruits tied to the legs of the big display table. It's possible such decoration was part of the era's definition of overabundance. I mean, who dresses up table legs?

And I question what fruits are piled up on the display. Pineapples? Giant avocados? Papayas? Excess can have different measures. Perhaps in an era when locally sourced meant the Back 40, having a papaya in the dead of winter flashed a message louder than any holiday light display.