The Big Freeze in DeLand, Florida 

𝟏𝟖𝟗𝟒 The end of December marked the beginning of a major weather event that shaped Volusia County’s economy for years. In what was called The Big Freeze, temperatures dropped to 15 degrees on December 29, 1894.

“The weather grew cold fast and this morning every orange was frozen solid and we think most of the trees are ruined,” wrote one observer. “The disaster is overwhelming. Don’t know how we will come out of it.”

The December cold left the leaves on the orange trees blackened and shriveled, but the trunks were not dead. When January 1895 was uncommonly warm and pleasant, undamaged trees put on new growth. It seemed that one crop had been lost, but better days might be ahead. 

During winter months, engineers on southbound trains would give an extra long whistle blast to warn residents of approaching cold waves. On February 8, the blasts must have been really long. Temperatures began falling at 10 a.m. and by 9 p.m. were at 28 degrees and still dropping. One grower noted, “An awful day; the worst Florida has ever known.” The newly budding trees were “killed to the ground,” he noted. For many years afterwards, every date in Florida was measured from The Big Freeze.

Henry DeLand’s daughter Helen placed the event in a broader perspective, noting that, as the protective forests diminished, cut down to provide lumber for houses and cleared land for planting, the frosts and freezes became more frequent, culminating in the “great cold” of 1894-95. New varieties of early oranges, such as those developed by Lue Gim Gong and Arthur G. Hamlin, proved promising, but the combined December and February freezes were, in Miss DeLand’s words, “staggering.”

SOURCES: THE STORY OF DELAND AND LAKE HELEN, BY Helen Parce DeLand, pps. 32-33. The photo, from the Bill Dreggors Collection in the WVHS Historic Photos Archive, shows a grove, possibly part of the John B. Stetson Estate, after the December 1894 freeze.