Florida by Michael Gannon

Author:Michael Gannon [Gannon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2003-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Industry and Agriculture

As Florida entered the 1940s, its industry and agriculture, slower than tourism to recover from the depression, were demonstrating new vitality and on a wider base than before. Production of paper from slash pine had become commercially competitive during the thirties, and the International Paper Company, followed shortly by the du Pont interests (St. Joe Paper Company), opened pulp mills at Panama City and Port St. Joe, respectively, to take advantage of the millions of acres of Panhandle pinelands. Virgin timber was rapidly being depleted, however. Because of fires, indiscriminate cutting, and failure to reseed, Florida possessed only one-fourth of its original area of forest land—and the New Deal reforestation programs were vigorously pushed.

At Tarpon Springs, Greek-Americans in diving suits worked the Gulf’s sponge beds. Cigar making, moved from Key West to east Tampa in the last century by Vicente Martinez Ybor, was thriving. Ybor City’s 122 factories employed 10,000 workers. With filler tobacco from Cuba and wrapper leaf from this country, the cigar makers, three men to a team, sat at long benches and hand-rolled over 250 million coronas, royals, perfectos, and panatelas a year. An entirely mechanized factory at Jacksonville, employing two thousand workers, mostly young white women, was able to double Tampa’s production—a sign of things to come, in Florida and elsewhere.

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