Plant City: Strawberry Capital of the World
Near Lakeland, Florida
Every February, Plant City hosts the Florida Strawberry Festival, drawing half a million visitors to a town of roughly forty thousand people. That ratio captures something essential: Plant City is defined by a single crop grown in the sandy flatlands of eastern Hillsborough County, where winter temperatures stay just warm enough to bring strawberries to market while the rest of the country is buried in snow.
The town traces its origins to eighteen eighty-four, when Henry Bradley Plant extended his South Florida Railroad through the area and a depot town took shape. The area had earlier been called Ichepucksassa, after a Native American village, and then Cork, before the town took the name Plant City in honor of the railroad baron whose line made the community viable. Plant himself was building an empire: his rail lines stretched across Florida's interior and terminated at a Tampa hotel so grand it still stands as the centerpiece of the University of Tampa campus. The town he named himself after became the winter strawberry center of the eastern United States, a distinction held for over a century.
