SANFORD, Fla. – Sanford is charming and inviting. It boasts a growing craft beer scene and enough restaurants and small shops to keep you engaged all weekend long.
But, the original plans for the city were much larger.
Brigitte Stephenson is the museum curator at the Sanford Museum. She talked to Matt Austin and Ginger Gadsden on Florida’s Fourth Estate about what almost was.
“Henry Sanford originally came down here in Florida and realized after the American Civil War that Florida was probably going to be a place that’s going to rebound, mainly because of citrus,” she said.
Sanford had a wealth of knowledge about the citrus industry and was even inducted into the Citrus Hall of Fame for his experimental gardens and groves.
So when he came to the area that is now named in his honor, he thought it was the perfect spot to design a city because it was the end of the line for riverboats on the St. John’s River.
“We were going to become the gateway city. The idea was that we would be the gateway to South Florida,” Stephenson said.
For a while, Stephenson said Sanford was the major Central Florida town in the area thanks in part to investors in the United Kingdom pouring into Henry Sanford’s Florida Land and Colonization Company.
But she said, “There are several different factors for why we didn’t become what Orlando is today.”
One reason is people who were focused on agriculture didn’t want to grow.
She said another is because, “We had a mayor on the eve of the great recession, turns out he was embezzling money.”
The fact that Henry Flagler built a railroad system to the Keys also cut into the plan of establishing Sanford as the gateway to the South.
Still, the town continued to establish itself as a citrus hub, despite controversy within the workforce.
“Henry Sanford tries originally hiring the local population, he does not think they do a good job and fires them. Then he tries bringing in people who were formerly enslaved, that were Black from Monticello, Florida in this area. Now, most of the people he fired before were white and very upset that they viewed these people were taking their jobs and tried to conduct a series of basically intimidation and murder to drive out these workers in the area,” Stephenson said.
She pointed out, “That’s the reason we have Georgetown, which is a historically Black community that was recently inducted in the National Register.”
To help overcome this issue, Henry Sanford brought in Swedish workers.
“Underneath the contract labor law, he is able to bring in Swedes and they have to work for him for five years and that would pay for their room, and boarding, and passage and they would eventually get a little bit of property in what is the area that we call New Upsala.”
After overcoming the heat, Stephenson said those families quickly assimilated and pointed out you will still meet a lot of people with Swedish last names in the area.
“But unfortunately, we had a freeze in 1895 and 1896 that destroyed our citrus industry and instead of being like, ‘Welp, I give up,’ the people of Sanford decided to do another luxury crop and they chose celery,” Stephenson said.
You wouldn’t know it, based on prices today, but Stephenson said, “It used to be considered one of the most expensive vegetables” and that “You can actually look at old hotel menus, like The Waldorf, and it’s like blanched celery is as much as like filet mignon or something like that, it’s wild.”
However, the celery gold mine also fizzled out after Stephenson said farmers over-inflated the industry to the point celery was no longer considered a unique commodity.
Despite the fact Sanford didn’t become everything Henry Sanford planned for it to become, Stephenson said it’s still a great place to call home.
“It may not necessarily be the biggest town in the area, but it’s a town full of heart, and a town full of people that are willing to help each other,” she said.
And, if you spend any time in the area, you will see it is going through a resurgence with new shops coming to town, new buildings under construction, and people from across Central Florida visiting the town’s square.
You can listen to every episode of Florida’s Fourth Estate in the media player below: