10/02/2026
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For roughly two generations Florida's leading early orange was, genetically, a single tree, and that one tree grew in a country preacher's front yard near Webster. 🍊
The Reverend Nathan L. Brown had moved his family from Alabama to the area that became Sumter County in 1847. The University of California Riverside Citrus Variety Collection records that the variety "originated as a chance seedling in the dooryard of Rev. N. L. Brown near Webster, Florida, and is said to have been planted in 1856." The state marker in Webster says the same. One seedling among his plantings ripened unusually early and sweet, and neighbors noticed.
Then it was bought. Riverside records that "the propagation rights were purchased about 1875 by J. L. Carney, who named it Parson Brown." Carney's method was budding: cutting living wood off the one tree and grafting it onto other rootstock, which means the fruit that went out in the crates was a clone. A 1951 account by the Parson's own grandson, published in the Florida Historical Quarterly, says Carney paid eighty dollars for the tree and then budded an entire forty acre grove with it.
Riverside's verdict on what followed: "its outstanding earliness soon popularized this variety and it quickly became the leading early orange, a position held until about 1920." The name became valuable enough to steal. The Slow Food Foundation records that "unscrupulous fruit growers would label the fruit of any sort of seedling tree Parson Brown."
The original tree reached sixty five feet and was killed in the freeze of 1895. By the following year it was standard nursery stock. Between 1928 and 1950, by that same family account, 1,035,655 Parson Brown trees were moved to Florida groves.
A million trees out of one dooryard, each crate a cutting off the same trunk. 🌴
