Orange: Where Orlando Began
Before the rockets. Before the castles. There were the groves.
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Picture Central Florida in spring: endless rows of dark-green trees, and the scent of orange blossom drifting for miles. This is the color of our beginning, and of the fruit that put Orlando on the map.
A seed from across the ocean.
Spanish settlers carried the first oranges to Florida in the 1500s and planted them near St. Augustine. Over three centuries the trees marched south and inland until citrus became the lifeblood of this land. When Florida became a state in 1845, "Mosquito County" traded its name for a sweeter one: Orange County.
Florida's golden rush.
From 1875 to 1895, Orlando was the beating heart of Florida's citrus trade. Railroads hauled crates of sunshine north, and grove fortunes turned small towns into cities.
Then came the winter of 1894–95. In a few bitter nights, the Great Freeze turned the groves black. Many walked away. The ones who stayed replanted, one tree at a time.
One of them was Dr. Philip Phillips, a Tennessee physician who lost his first grove to the freeze. He came back in 1897 and built one of the largest citrus empires in America. In 1929 his company pioneered flash pasteurization, which took the metallic taste out of canned juice and put Florida on breakfast tables across the nation. In 1954 he sold more than 3,000 acres of groves to Minute Maid, one of the largest grove sales in Florida history. By the 1950s, from a single tower in Clermont, you could look out over some 17 million citrus trees across eight counties.
The groves faded. The color never did.
Today Florida grows barely 5% of the oranges it grew at its peak. Citrus still runs through Orlando's soul, though. It's in Orange Avenue and Orange Blossom Trail, in the Dr. Phillips neighborhood, and in old grove towns like Winter Garden and Winter Park. It's in the Citrus Bowl, which started in 1947 as the Tangerine Bowl, was renamed in 1983 through a deal with the Florida Citrus Commission, and still kicks off every New Year's at Camping World Stadium as the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl. And it's on the court: in 2019–20 the Orlando Magic traded their famous pinstripes for orange, with "ORL" across the chest and one line to explain it: "From orange groves to Orange County. This is the ORL." A season later the pinstripes came back in orange, for what Orlando is famous for: sunshine and citrus.
Our orange.
At SPOT X Hotel Orlando, our orange honors all of it: the Spanish settlers, the growers who replanted after every freeze, the pioneers who reinvented juice, and a city that kept its color long after the groves were gone. Orlando is the Theme Park Capital of the World, and our orange is a reminder of where it all began.
