Plant City: The Magnate Who Built a Railroad Town
Near Lakeland, Florida
The town outside your window is named not for its greenery but for a railroad baron. Henry Bradley Plant was the man who brought the South Florida Railroad through Hillsborough County in eighteen eighty-four, and when a community grew up around the depot, it took his name. Plant was not modest about his ambitions: he was building a transportation empire to rival Henry Flagler's on the east coast, lacing Florida's interior with rail lines and capping them with grand resort hotels.
The depot here served the agricultural valley that became Florida's winter strawberry capital. Hillsborough County now ships more fresh strawberries than any other county in the eastern United States, the harvest running from December through March when northern fields sit frozen. The old Union Depot building, built in nineteen oh nine where two rail lines met, served both the Atlantic Coast Line and the Seaboard Air Line. It still stands downtown, a reminder that Plant City's identity was built in two layers: the railroad magnate who named it, and the strawberry fields that fed it.
