Florida Oranges by Erin Thursby

Florida Oranges by Erin Thursby

Author:Erin Thursby [Thursby, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, General
ISBN: 9781467141192
Google: VkWrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T05:14:46+00:00


SUNSHINE IN A GLASS

In the iconography of Florida oranges in the last century, there’s nothing more central than a glass of Florida orange juice. To picture the first citrus juice processing plant in Florida, you’d have to go back to Haines City in 1915, when cars were an eccentricity and roads were more often dust than pavement. On the topmost floor, workers halved grapefruit, placing the halves fruit side down on an extractor. The juice collection methods used gravity, the juice running down to the lowest floor, into their bottles, and labeled Street’s Pure Grapefruit Juice. The quart glass bottles left the plant in horse-drawn carts, clinking in their wooden cases to be delivered to the railway station.

High freight costs, poor shelf life and the First World War ended the venture, but the logistical citrus juicing knowledge won at the plant during the tenure of Street and others at the building would serve the orange industry well in later years. Street’s son, C.C. Street, said that “the most basic knowledge of citrus processing and later canning was developed” at the facility.

The Polk Canning Company took over the building in 1916, with all of its equipment powered entirely by steam, save for the electric lights. Its business centered more on canning and less on juice, but it took a few years for it to get the tin cans formulated for citrus. The acidity of citrus tends to quickly rust most metal, so this was invaluable when the industry began canning concentrate. R.L. Polk Sr. said they shipped the first carload of tinned citrus by train in the fall of 1921.

At the peak of its operations in the 1930s, the Polk Canning Company employed eight hundred people. The building would stand until the late twentieth century, and before that, Suni Citrus used it as a lab, storage facility and offices, starting in the 1950s.

If you’ve a tendency to think of bygone days as better than modern times in every aspect, a sip of commercial orange juice in the 1930s might dispel that notion. Basically, it was boiled orange juice, which was then canned. As oranges have a complex, volatile flavor profile, the concoction was nothing like a fresh-squeezed orange. Depending on the process used, it might have tasted like vaguely flavored sugar water with just a touch of turpentine.

But there were important advancements made in the 1920s and ’30s. William John Howey, founder of Howey-in-the-Hills, sold juice at his many land-sales office locations across the country and in Florida as a way to buoy sagging profits because of the Florida Land Boom Bust and the Great Depression. For maximum profit, he opened his own juice processing plant and developed a quick electric pasteurization technique, one of the first in the state to do so.

Orange juice, even as far back as the early 1900s, benefited from an image as a healthful beverage, with some researchers claiming that orange juice could help combat “Acidosis,” a condition discredited as highly uncommon by the 1930s. Next, juice promoters touted vitamin C as the new panacea, a tactic that’s alive and well today.



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