The Great Freeze of 1894-95 at Titusville

The Great Freeze came to Titusville twice. On December 29, 1894, the temperature fell to 18°F, and on February 8, 1895, after a month of warm weather had coaxed the orange trees into new growth, it fell to 19°F. Those are the readings in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s report on the freezes, written by Herbert J. Webber in 1895. The first freeze took the crop. The second took the trees.

December

Webber’s report says the first blizzard began on December 27, 1894, and peaked on December 29, with killing frosts and freezing temperatures for three days running across northern and central Florida and winds of 25 to 30 miles an hour. Jacksonville fell to 14°F, a degree lower than in the great freeze of January 12, 1886.

The National Park Service’s history of Titusville describes what that meant on the Indian River. The region suffered less than points farther north, but growers still lost virtually all the fruit not yet picked. The trees themselves came through with relatively little damage, and there was some optimism. Then a warm spell set in and the trees began to bud.

February

The warm weather was the trap. Webber writes that orange buds started pushing around January 18, and the two weeks before the second freeze were “fine growing weather,” with nights no colder than 50° and days near 80°. By February 7 the new shoots were one to four inches long and flower buds were forming.

The second blizzard ran from February 7 to 9, 1895, with winds of 30 to 35 miles an hour and snow and sleet in parts of the state. Its lowest point was the morning of February 8. Webber’s table shows these readings for the stations nearest Titusville:

Station	December 29, 1894	February 8, 1895
Jacksonville	14°	14°
Sanford	18°	18°
Titusville	18°	19°
Merritts Island	22°	22°
Melbourne	22° (unofficial)	no reading

“The oldest and youngest trees, whether sweet or sour, were alike killed to the ground throughout the greater part of the State,” Webber wrote. The Park Service form says trees in north Florida were nearly all killed and those in the Indian River region were “substantially damaged.”

What it did to Titusville

The losses ran through the town’s whole economy. The Park Service form says the railroads and shippers were hit even harder than the growers: hundreds of cars and boats sat idle for lack of fruit, and thousands of men whose jobs were buying, selling and hauling it were out of work. A city marker on Washington Avenue says Titusville’s economy started to decline when the freezes “destroyed citrus, pineapple and other commercial crops.”

Then, in December 1895, fire destroyed three quarters of the wooden buildings in the downtown business district, according to the same marker. Afterward only brick or masonry buildings could be insured, and rebuilding was slow.

And after

The groves came back, and the freeze moved the industry toward them. With commercial citrus in north Florida wiped out, the Park Service form says, many growers moved to the Indian River, and by 1900 Brevard was again one of Florida’s leading citrus counties, with much of the production and processing centered around Titusville. Thomas Nevins’s Nevins Fruit Company, started in the late 1880s, was formally organized in 1898 and became one of the oldest continuously operated citrus businesses in the Indian River area.

The citrus trade that the freeze interrupted is on our citrus shipping page, and Mims’s groves have their own page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith