Orange City: The Minnesotans Who Came for Their Health

Orange City was founded by people running from winter. In eighteen eighty-two, a group of settlers from Minnesota, many of them suffering from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments that doctors of the era treated with warm, dry climates, established a colony in Volusia County along the St. Johns River. They named their community for the orange groves they hoped to plant and the health they hoped to recover.

The town grew steadily around citrus agriculture and the tourist traffic drawn to nearby Blue Spring, a first-magnitude freshwater spring that pumps out more than one hundred million gallons of water per day at a constant seventy-two degrees. Blue Spring became a wintering ground for Florida manatees, and the state park established around it protects one of the largest manatee aggregations in the country. Orange City itself remained a small town of about twelve thousand people, close enough to Deland and Daytona Beach to pull from their economies but distinct in its own quieter way, still oriented toward the river and the springs that drew those first cold-weather refugees more than a hundred and forty years ago.