Plant City

Strangers are greeted as friends as they walk the brick paved streets of our town.  The old is not thrown away but celebrated in Plant City.  An old office building becomes international headquarters for the Paso Fino Horse Association; an old railroad station turns to exhibiting and teaching Plant City history.  But this is no small town trying to revive its past.  Plant City is about today and tomorrow!

The area surrounding Plant City is a patchwork quilt of pasturelands and citrus groves, strawberry fields and nursery farms.  This agricultural fabric is laced together by an infrastructure of highways and railroads that move the fruits of labor to markets all over the world.  Plant City’s high standard of living comes from this land.  Mining and agriculture and the businesses that support these industries remain the foothold of the local economy, after 120 years.

But the strawberry is the crop for which Plant City is most widely known.  The majority of all the winter strawberries in the U.S. are grown on 7,000 acres of farmland surrounding Plant City.  This area, rich in minerals and fertile soil, has a history of prosperity and promise that precedes the Civil War era.

In the early 1800s, after the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States, the territory was wilderness populated only by indigenous people know as the Seminole.  In 1842, the federal government made land available to pioneers through the Armed Occupation Act.  One could earn 160 acres by homesteading the land for five years.  A few hardy souls settled in the area near Plant City and went about farming and rehabilitating citrus groves abandoned by the Spanish settlers before them.  During this period, there were occasional wars and skirmishes with the Seminole tribes who were protecting the land on which their ancestors had flourished.  Still these early pioneers persisted and continued developing the wilderness.