Orange County, Florida: History
The land that is Orange County was part of the first land to come up from below the Early Oligocene sea 33.9–28.4 million years ago and is known as Orange Island. Orange County's Rock Spring location is a Pleistocene fossil-bearing area and has yielded a vast variety of birds and mammals including giant sloth, mammoth, camel, and the dire wolf dating around 1.1 million years ago.
Immediately following the transfer of Florida from the Spanish to the United States in 1821, Governor Andrew Jackson created two counties: Escambia to the west of the Suwannee River and St. Johns to the east. In 1824, the area to the south of St. Johns County was organized as Mosquito County, and Enterprise was named its county seat. This large county took up much of central Florida. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized relocation of the Seminole people from Florida to Oklahoma; this resulted in pushback from the Seminole community, leading to the Second Seminole War. In 1842, a bill was passed in the Florida Territorial Council to rename Mosquito County to Leigh Read County, however, this renaming never took place. Two years later, in 1844, residents of Mosquito County petitioned the Territorial Council to rename the county Harrison County, in honor of President William Henry Harrison, who had only served 31 days in office before dying of Pneumonia. The petition was started in response to county residents finding the name unappealing. In 1845 when Florida became a state, the county was renamed Orange County. After the population increased in the region, the legislature organized several counties, such as Osceola (1887), Seminole (1913), Lake (1887), and Volusia (1854), from its territory.
Early on, the county greatly suffered, due to the Union blockade, but things greatly improved during Reconstruction. A boom in population, resulting from the incorporation of the Town of Orlando in 1875, greatly changed the demographics of the county. Orlando, establishing itself as a city in 1885, experienced rapid growth from 1875 to 1895, due to it becoming the hub of Florida's citrus industry. The fruit that constituted the county's main commodity crop was the impetus to the aforementioned county's renaming. The dark-green foliage of orange trees filled the county, as did the scent of the orange blossoms when in bloom. Fewer commercial orange groves remained by the end of the twentieth century. The majority of groves were destroyed by the freezing temperatures that occurred in December 1983, January 1985, and December 1989, the worst since 1899. …