Sanford and the Celery Delta, A Town Built on Muck

Twenty miles north of Orlando, at the southern tip of Lake Monroe, Henry Sanford built a town in the eighteen seventies on land he imagined would become the commercial gateway to a subtropical paradise. Sanford was a former diplomat, a Connecticut Yankee who had served as minister to Belgium under President Lincoln. He bought more than twelve thousand acres of Florida scrubland, laid out streets, built a hotel, planted orange groves, and tried to recruit Swedish and other northern European settlers, attempting to transplant European agricultural civilization to the Florida frontier.

The venture was, by most measures, a failure. The soil didn't cooperate. The settlers left.

The orange groves struggled. Sanford died in eighteen ninety-one having spent most of his fortune on an idea that never quite worked. What did work, eventually, was the muck.

In the low-lying black soil of the St. Johns River floodplain around Lake Monroe, farmers discovered in the eighteen nineties, after freezes ruined the citrus groves, that the dark organic earth was extraordinarily fertile for celery. Celery became the town's identity, earning it the title Celery City.

The celery fields and packing houses employed many Black laborers, among them residents of the established Black community of Goldsboro, which had been incorporated as a separate all-Black municipality in eighteen ninety-one and was later annexed by Sanford. Goldsboro is one of the oldest African-American founded communities in the United States. Its story runs parallel to Eatonville's, a community built in the narrow margin of autonomy that the Jim Crow South allowed, sustained by its own churches, its own schools, and the hard physical labor of the muck farms.