Jim Bradshaw: Start the year with sweet satsumas

Until relatively recent times, the New Year was the time to exchange gifts in many Acadiana households, and it was almost a certainty that a sweet-tasting orange or satsuma would be one of the things, sometimes the only thing, stuffed into a stocking.
Gifts were simpler then and oranges were plentiful.
Much of southern Louisiana was covered with citrus trees. In fact, Cameron Parish was once one of the leading orange producers in the nation.
In 1892, the New Orleans Picayune reported, “The future of southwest Louisiana can be assured financially because of its gigantic orange groves. In Cameron Parish alone, 1,500,000 of the finest oranges were produced. They are said to be the sweetest and best of all.”
According to that report, someone driving the 16 miles across Grand Chenier would “see nothing but orange groves.”
The trees were such a symbol of Cameron Parish, that growers there planned to send a potted tree “with a thousand oranges on its limbs” to the 1893 World’s Fair.
Freezes, hurricanes, droughts, and saltwater encroachment did in the Cameron groves.
Most of them were gone by the late 1920s or earlier. A bitter freeze in 1930 finished off practically all the trees that were still producing.
But they were valuable while they lasted.
In 1915, according to an account by southwest Louisiana historian Nola Mae Ross, a New Orleans firm sent a representative to Grand Chenier to buy some orange groves.
He offered $100 an acre — a lot of money in those days.
The landowners said no.
He offered $150. Still no deal.
The growers were harvesting $400 or more per acre every year and thought things would get better.
They weren’t alone.
The Lake Charles American (forerunner to today’s American Press), reported in the late 1890s, “Fruits fit for the gods hang in rich profusion from the loaded branches of orange trees,” and said that southwest Louisiana groves were “places of wonder for 12 months of the year.”
Charles Fitzenreiter, my grandmother’s father, settled in what is now north Lake Charles in 1898 and planted 15 acres of satsumas, tangerines, limes and grapefruit.
He called his orchard The Tangisuma.
Some of his trees continued to bear until the bitter winter of 1940, the coldest ever in southwest Louisiana.
By that time the biggest part of his sprawling orchard had become the Orange Grove Cemetery in Lake Charles.
The tradition of Louisiana citrus for Christmas and New Year’s hasn’t completely gone away, but most of the state’s growers today are small-scale, part-time operators who sell their fruit through roadside stands or from the backs of trucks.
The problems for our citrus farmers are the same as they were a century ago — freezes that can reach even into balmy southern parishes and hurricanes that seem to be visiting more regularly and with more punch these days.
There are some orchards in Plaquemines Parish, the southernmost in the state, but growers there have had to keep up a stubborn fight to maintain a crop.
The first Plaquemines Parish Orange Festival was held in 1947 to promote the citrus crop, but a severe freeze in 1951 nearly crushed the fair and industry.
Record-breaking freezes struck again in 1962 and 1963, but growers persevered and were making a comeback in 1965, when Hurricane Betsy uprooted many of the trees.
Camille did more damage a few years later. Since then other freezes have damaged the crop, and discouraged growers, but some still persist.
In 2018, citrus was Louisiana’s number one fruit crop, but fruit trees are only a tiny part of our agricultural economy.
Commercial growers planted only 884 acres with a harvest worth $9.6 million, according to the LSU AgCenter. Satsumas made up two-thirds of that crop and navel oranges most of the rest of it.
That was down from 964 acres planted in 2017 with a harvest value of more than $11 million.
Only 10 of those acres harvested in 2018 were in Cameron Parish, where gigantic groves once made it a leading producer of the best and sweetest oranges in the nation.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.