FLORIDA Settlers:

    Florida evolved through time and trouble. The development of railroads, agriculture, including field crops such as citrus and celery, the cattle industry, and the St. John’s River, were all factors that encouraged settlement. From pre-history through the twentieth century, early Florida settlers were incredibly diverse.  Early settlers, who came to Florida, came to a land void of agriculturally beneficial recourses.  The vast expanse of Florida was pine baron, with poor soil and barely enough sustenance for the scrawny cattle native to the region.  What these settlers built, what we have today, is a tribute to the their hard work and to the hard life they lived.  Men like Henry Sanford helped forge a society out of the vast Florida wilderness.  With the introduction of industrialized transportation and post-antebellum methods of farming, the Florida open-range wilderness was able to emerge, by the 1950’s, as one of the top citrus and beef cattle producers in the country.  This is the story of that wilderness, some of the people who helped tame it, and the implements and procedures they used.


+Transportation    +Biography of Henry Sanford
+Cracker Culture and Early Cattle Industry
+Agriculture       +Daily Life and Struggles and Success
+Bibliographical Information
+1895 Map of Florida