Old Titusville
Agriculture

Mims: the grove town north of Titusville

Mims began in the 1880s as an offshoot of La Grange, built a railroad depot and packing plant on the line from Enterprise, and lived on citrus through the 1894-95 freeze and after. What the records show about the town and its groves.

By The Old Titusville History Team Updated October 15, 2026
Workers at a Florida orange grove, period photograph.
Workers in a Florida orange grove, from the New York Public Library's collection of period photographs. New York Public Library Digital Collections via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Mims is the old grove community just north of Titusville, and it began as an offshoot of an older one. The National Register nomination for La Grange Church says that in the 1880s, residents of La Grange, a settlement begun in 1860 by families who came to plant citrus and fruit, founded the agricultural community of Mims a mile to the north. It took its name from the Mims family, among the settlers who built La Grange’s church.

The depot and the packing plant

Mims grew on the railroad. When the line from Enterprise on the St. Johns River came through in the 1880s, the nomination says, Mims residents “took advantage of the new Atlantic Coast, St. Johns, and Indian River Railway, which connected them with Enterprise and the interior of the state, to build a depot and packing plant.” The exportation of farm products to northern markets in the 1880s, in the nomination’s words, “insured the permanence of the Indian River coast settlements.”

Period photograph of a Florida orange grove.
A Florida orange grove of the late 1800s, from the New York Public Library's collection. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public domain.

The freeze

The Great Freeze of 1894-95 hit Mims as it hit every grove town on the river. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s report recorded 18°F at Titusville, just south, on December 29, 1894, and 19°F on February 8, 1895, after a warm spell had pushed the trees into new growth. Webber wrote that after the second freeze, “the oldest and youngest trees, whether sweet or sour, were alike killed to the ground throughout the greater part of the State.” The full story of that winter is on our freeze page.

Groves in the 20th century

Citrus kept going in Mims well into the 20th century. One small, documented example: Harry T. Moore, the NAACP leader who lived in Mims, tended a modest orange grove there along with teaching, according to Florida’s 2006 investigation of the bombing that killed him and his wife in their Mims home in 1951. The state’s 2003 marker at the LaGrange Mims Community Cemetery tells the history of Mims’s Black community, whose St. James Colored Missionary Baptist Church was organized in 1894 and built its own church in Mims in 1904.

From grove town to suburb

The space-era boom reached Mims too. The Census Bureau counted 1,307 people in the unincorporated Mims area in 1960 and 8,309 in 1970.

A late-19th-century Florida pineapple field.
A Florida pineapple field of the late 1800s, another crop of the Indian River country. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public domain.

Further Reading

Sources

  1. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form, La Grange Church and Cemetery (1995)
  2. Herbert J. Webber, "The Two Freezes of 1894-95 in Florida, and What They Teach," Yearbook of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1895 (1896)
  3. Office of the Attorney General of Florida and FDLE, Case Summary: the bombing of the Harry T. Moore residence (2006)
  4. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, Number of Inhabitants: Florida, Table 6

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mims citrus la grange freeze