The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-01-29
wAr DoWX IN ELoRlDA.
The Devastation Wrought by the Recent
 Freeze-up.

IEtGAt-hps
 Many in this city interested in Rock ledge, Fla, and other portions of that state will be interested in the following letter from Florida which appeared in
 the New York Evening Post:
 The day after Christmas we started on our long-Iooked- -forward-to journey
 ito Palm Beach, on Lake Worth, to spend week at that most southerly point reached by the railroad in the United States. A journey that, a year or two ago, consumed a couple of days can now be accomplished in 8 few hours and the traveller, leaving Jacksonville or St. Augustine in the morning, is de- posted at the Royal Poinciana hotel the same night. Once there, you are in another country-below the orange belt, Giant cocoa palms wave in the bereze, and the farmer who has only twenty acres of pineapples is doing business in a small way.
 As we walked through the grounds of
 the hotel on that lovely morning, De cember 27, we felt that at last we had found tropical Florida. Poinsettias, poincianas acalyphas, coleus, crotons, cannas aloes, cactus of every variety on every hand Behind the hotel an ample vegetable garden-peas in pod, stringbeans, egg plants, like Otsego county in July-and there half a mile away the Atlantic ocean rolling in, the gulf stream just off the shore. This scene we left on Thursday. Friday was
 too windy to go out fishing, as we had planned, and that night occurred the grand ball which was to open the new casino. Dressing for the ball, thought it bit chilly, and I noticed that steam heat, to my surprise, was turned on in the hotel corridors. At midnight the roaring of the wind could be heard above the music, and we stepped out doors. It was bitter cold.
 Here, in tropical Florida, the everI dreaded but never really expected had happened, and there was a frost at Lake Worth. And if frost there, what was it in Orange county, 15o miles north? And what did it mean? Inn agine a. killing frost in Osego in July! lnE .QdIldBG WOull lJC CUB +ASN-AAA-eo " the misfortune that has come, unher- aided, unannounced, by the poasted and expensive weather bureau, all over this fair state. By Saturday morning at Lake Worth the storm had abated by noon the thermometer was 40 de- grees, but the night before 1t had touched 26 degrees and great the dam age. The tall cocoanuts waved brown, shaggy branches; the small ones lay prone on the ground, dead and dry, The beauty of the garden had passed away in the night; everything was black ruined, and decaying.
 Starting back on Monday, we passed through a state scorched, burned-ev- cry green thing dead, The first orange groves are near Rockledge. The oranges were hanging on the dull branches, covered with dried, brown, twisted leaves rustling and shaking dead in the wind the fruit an ice ball, l the night before ruined, and unstable. As I write, no accurate knowledge of the damage is obtainable, as it is yet l too early to tell how many trees them selves are kill8dato the ground. l have l seen some with the bark all cracked | and twisted off by the terrible frost.
 Through a ruined land we travelled | all day, the groves looking, if anything, l worse as we got further north-in most | striking contrast to their appearance | four days earlier. Almost every single | thing in my garden in Orlando Is | killed, from roses to tall bamboos and | avacado pear trees. Most of my neigh bors suffer worse than l do, for I had | sold and picked my oranges before | Christmas; but that was the exception. Not 10 per cent. of the crop in this sec tion had gone forward, and it is a com plete loss. So sudden and unexpected | was it that at o'clock in the evening | no one could have foretold that at mid night the thermometer would have | stood at 20 degrees, and by a. m. every orange in Florida would be a ball | of ice.
 The courage of the people is beyond praise and better times are ahead with the sDirit evinced on all sides