Edward Porcher: the Cocoa citrus grower who washed and stamped his fruit first

Edward Postell Porcher was, in the words of his National Register nomination, “one of the largest individual growers of Indian River citrus fruit in the early twentieth century,” an inventor of patented citrus-handling machinery, and an organizer of the growers’ associations. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1861, came to Florida in 1884, and lived the last 23 years of his life in the coquina house he built on the river in Cocoa.

Before Florida

Porcher came from a South Carolina Huguenot family; the nomination traces it to Isaac Porcher de Richebourg, who came from France to South Carolina with his brother Philip in 1680. Edward attended military school, studied insurance law, wrote fire insurance in Atlanta and Chicago, and tried silver mining in Mexico before moving to Florida in 1884.

In 1885 he and his bride, Byrnina Mona Peck of Atlanta, settled in the groves, living in rough quarters until their first house was finished at Courtenay. Her father, the nomination says, was William Henry Peck, a Georgia novelist, editor and college president.

The grower

Porcher was president of the Deerfield Groves. He organized and led two growers’ groups, the Indian River Orange Growers’ Association and the Indian River and Lake Worth Pineapple Growers’ Association, whose aims, according to the nomination, included uniform prices, better selection and packing of fruit, recognized standards for brands, and profitable returns.

He was also an inventor. The nomination, quoting sources from his lifetime, credits him as the first citrus grower to wash and stamp his fruit, the inventor of the first fruit-stamping machine, and the holder of basic patents for the first clamp truck for handling packed boxes in packinghouses. He was the first, it says, to inoculate citrus trees with copper sulphate against fungus disease. His success was put down to “the strictest attention to the business in hand.”

The sportsman

Off the groves, Porcher helped establish Cocoa’s first golf course and belonged to the Chevy Chase Country Club, the Halifax River Yacht Club, the Indian River Yacht Club and the Florida Yacht Club in Jacksonville. He sailed his own boat, the Falcon, was an expert trapshooter, and raced speedboats on the Indian River in the sport’s early days.

The house and the end

In 1916 the Porchers moved into the house on Delannoy Avenue, with a packinghouse on the riverbank behind it for fruit brought by boat from their Merritt Island groves. Edward Porcher died in June 1939 at 78. His son Arthur, who inherited the citrus holdings and the estate, died the next month in an automobile accident. The house is covered on our Porcher House page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith