The 1894-95 Great Freeze on the Indian River

The Great Freeze was two freezes, six weeks apart. The first came on December 29, 1894, the second on February 8, 1895, and the second did most of the killing. Herbert J. Webber, who studied the damage for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote that after it “the oldest and youngest trees, whether sweet or sour, were alike killed to the ground throughout the greater part of the State.” On the Indian River, Titusville recorded 18°F the first time and 19°F the second.

The December blizzard

A blizzard reached Florida on December 27, 1894, and the cold peaked on the morning of the 29th, when Jacksonville fell to 14°F. Webber estimated that about 3,000,000 boxes of oranges were still on the trees. They were almost a total loss: cut open on the morning of the 29th, the fruit was a solid mass of ice. The leaves froze stiff and rattled in the wind, and except in a few protected groves and in the southern part of the state, all of them died.

The trees were mostly dormant, and the big ones held. Small seedlings and young budded trees were mostly killed to the ground, and practically every lemon tree in the northern and central parts of the state died back to the roots, but orange trees four to six inches or more across were seldom seriously injured. Webber put the danger plainly: the 1894-95 temperatures were only slightly lower than those of the 1886 freeze, whose damage was mostly repaired the next year. Either freeze alone, he wrote, “would not have done much greater damage.” What made the winter a disaster was that the second one came so soon.

The thaw and the second freeze

January turned warm. About January 18, Webber reported, the orange buds began to push, and the two weeks before the second freeze were fine growing weather, with nights no colder than 50° and days usually reaching 80°. By February the new shoots were one to four inches long, flower buds were forming, and growers were elated that the orange tree had survived such cold.

The second freeze ran from February 7 to 9, 1895, lowest on the morning of the 8th. Jacksonville again reached 14°F, and stations across the orange belt read 16° to 19°. This time the trees were awake, stripped of their leaves and full of new growth, and in Webber’s words “the little life left was entirely destroyed in many of them.” In many groves, budded and seedling orange trees 20 to 40 years old were killed to the ground; hammock groves suffered least. The large pomelo, or grapefruit, trees that had survived the first freeze were almost all split open and killed by the second.

The readings in Brevard

Webber’s table lists temperatures by station, north to south. These are the Brevard entries:

Station	December 29, 1894	February 8, 1895
Titusville	18°F	19°F
Merritts Island	22°F	22°F
Melbourne	22°F (unofficial)	no reading

There is no reading for Cocoa or Rockledge in the table. Webber did note one Rockledge casualty: the satin leaf tree “was frozen down about Rockledge, its northern limit.”

Did the lagoon protect the groves?

Less than people hoped. Webber found that water did protect trees close to it. On the south side of Lake Harris and Lake Eustis, the rows nearest the water kept some leaves, and on Tampa Bay some groves at the shore were almost unharmed. But the effect faded fast with distance and was hardly noticeable two miles from the bay. He also found that in any given latitude, the temperature was much the same whether a place was inland or on the coast: Melbourne, on the east coast, read almost the same as Avon Park in the interior. Serious damage stopped only south of about the 27th parallel, well south of Brevard.

The National Park Service’s history of Titusville says the Indian River region “suffered less than points north,” but that growers there lost virtually all their unharvested fruit in December and their trees were substantially damaged in February.

What it cost the river towns

Rockledge shows the damage in people. Its National Register documentation says the town’s population fell from a pre-freeze high of 400 to about 272 by 1900. Most owners of small groves were ruined and left, the form says, and only the larger growers had the capital to recover. Tourism fell off at the same time, as the Florida East Coast Railway carried visitors past the Indian River to Palm Beach and Miami.

Titusville took a second blow that year. In December 1895 a fire destroyed three quarters of its wooden downtown buildings, and afterward, the city’s marker says, only brick or masonry buildings could be insured.

Recovery came within the decade. By 1900, according to the Park Service, Brevard was again one of Florida’s leading citrus counties, as growers from North Florida moved south.

The lesson Webber drew

Webber’s report ended with practical advice. A few growers had banked earth up around their tree trunks, covering the union of bud and stock, and in those groves the buds and part of the trunk survived. He recommended that growers bank every tree each winter, by the middle of December, and remove the soil about March 1, at an expense he estimated at no more than half a cent a tree.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon