Hi, I'm Stephanie Smith.

I'm curious about gladiolus farming in Lee County and why did it end?

They were grown all over Lee County.

My grandad had farmed originally where the Landings is in Fort Myers.

They had farmed where Canterbury School is, and Edison College.

Canterbury was donated by my parents and grandparents.

We grew flowers out on 82 and 75, and then out in the Lehigh Acres.

Then we finally moved to Hendry County Hi, I'm Douglas Zipperer.

I'm a third generation Florida flower grower.

My grandfather originally met Rex Beach up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, about 1923 or 1924.

He was selling floral supplies at a wholesale house up there at the time.

Rex Beach's money man was looking for somebody to invest in gladiolas and he asked my grandad if he knew anybody that knew anything about growing gladiolas and my grandad didn't know anything about growing gladiolas, but my grandad said he knew everything there was about growing gladiolas.

Thus started the Zipperer gladiolas business.

Rex Beach is an interesting guy.

Rex Beach was like Zane Gray.

He was a very popular adventure writer back in the 20s and 30s and he started out in Sebring.

His foreman was John O. Zipperer.

Hi, I'm Brady Vogt.

I've been in Lee County since 1964, and have been in the flower business.

Originally we started in Sebring with Rex Beach.

My grandfather had told Rex, though, he felt it was too cold in Sebring.

The winters got too cold and would freeze the flowers.

After Rex Beach's death, he moved the flower operation to Fort Myers.

We have a nice bookstore.

It's called Everglades Fine Books.

Curiously we're located right across the street from what for many, many years was the biggest gladiolas farming operation in Lee County; owned and managed by the Schultz family.

What it essentially did was it connected 41 with McGregor.

Okay?

It was a sand trail.

And then, then it became when it became known as Gladiolus Drive I would guess probably by the mid 1940's.

Norman Cox and Al Alvord and Fred Wesemeyer and these guys, the A and W Bulb Road right off of Gladiolus was all flower farms.

The gladiolas were a big part of the city of Fort Myers and back in the day when very little was in Fort Myers, the gladiola growers were the ones that brought the jobs to the county.

My grandad bought Rex Beach out in 1929, so Zipperer Farms started in 1929.

We farmed glads until about 2009.

Originally, my grandfather farmed probably about 100 acres, but when we'd reached our peak probably in the early 2000s, we were probably up to about 1,200 acres of gladiolus, which was probably about 35 to 40 million bulbs a year we were growing.

We were at that time the world's largest gladiola grower.

They made very good money back in those days.

That sign that said, Lee County Gladiolus Capital of the World, that referred to the efficiency of the growers.

The reason it was called the Gladiolus Capital of the World was because they got the most production per acre out of any place in the continental United States.

A lot of the varieties that we grew were ones we developed.

we've actually hybridized quite a few varieties that are still in existence today.

Originally, the original gladiolus growers shipped by train.

All of the original flowers went by train all the way across the US up to New York.

Then the truck lines moved in, and then most of the glads were shipped by trucks after that with a few being shipped by air.

They were a very heavy product.

And so, It was very expensive to fly a gladiola.

We're filming our old packing house here on Hanson Street.

We used to bring all the flowers in from the farm and process them here, cut the bottoms off, pack it, put them in bunches of 10s and put them in boxes and ship them out the door.

Gladiolus was a very labor intensive crop.

It took lots of labor to plant the bulbs in the ground, turn them upright.

It took lots of labor to cut the flowers.

It took lots of labor to pack the flowers, and then it took lots of labor to dig the bulbs and clean the bulbs.

When the water started to get salty in Fort Myers and hurting the flower crop, we moved them to Hendry County.

In the early 2000s, the Department of Agriculture found gladiola rust in one of the competing farms.

Thereafter, we were inspected and we had no rust at the time, but a few months later, we're not sure how, we ended up getting the rust.

We battled the rust for two or three years and a lot of new regulations that came with it and finally got rid of the rust, but did not get rid of the new regulations that came along with it.

And after multiple years of battling what was already an extremely hard business, we concluded that it was no longer economic because of the new regulations to continue on, so we were forced to shut down the business and close the doors.

That was basically the end of the gladiola industry in Florida.