The Citrus Empire: John Shary and the Grapefruit Capital

In nineteen twelve, a Nebraska-born land developer named John H. Shary arrived in the lower Rio Grande Valley and saw something that other people had mostly overlooked. The soil was deep and rich. The winters were mild. The irrigation ditches being cut along the river could deliver enough water to make almost anything grow. Shary looked at the chaparral and cactus and decided to plant grapefruit.

He purchased a lift station in nineteen fourteen that irrigated fifteen thousand acres. The following year he put in his first commercial citrus orchard. In nineteen twenty, the first commercial shipments of citrus from the lower Valley went out packed in onion crates, because proper citrus boxes had not yet been manufactured in sufficient quantity. By the time Shary was done, his operation at Sharyland, near Mission, covered approximately fifteen thousand acres of citrus trees and had earned him the informal title: Father of the Texas Citrus Industry.

Earlier growers had already shown the way was possible. Carlota Vela had cultivated quality oranges at Laguna Seca Ranch by eighteen seventy-eight. W. A. Fitch planted a commercial-scale grapefruit orchard near Mercedes around nineteen oh seven. But Shary brought capital and promotion on a scale the Valley had not seen. He recruited settlers, sold parcels, and advertised the mild winters and the fruit-bearing trees in pamphlets that circulated across the Midwest.

The citrus belt that grew up along the Valley in the nineteen twenties and thirties made the region famous. The Ruby Red grapefruit, whose red-fleshed mutation was discovered somewhere in the Valley around this era and patented in nineteen twenty-nine, became the state fruit of Texas in nineteen ninety-three. A century after Shary arrived, the lower Valley still ships citrus every winter, though the acreage is a fraction of what it once was. The groves you drive past here are part of a tradition he seeded.