75th Annual Florida Orange Blossom Festival 2012

The Orange Blossom Festival is one of the oldest continually running public Florida events and this year Broward County's longest-running community celebration will be celebrating its 75th anniversary. On the weekend of February 25th and 26th , attendees will converge on the town of Davie, Florida to enjoy a weekend of free fun with more than 250 different displays, a parade down Orange Drive, a Pro Rodeo event, an arts and crafts show, musical entertainment, an animal farm, an old-fashioned farmers market and a whole lot more.

Davie Mayor Judy Paul said she is excited to be a part of “The premier event in Davie and it's something that everyone looks forward to. It brings thousands and thousands of people into the town, and it gives us an opportunity to showcase our agricultural roots and our historical background.” These days the Orange Blossom Festival is a bit more crowded and commercialized than it used to be back in 1926 when the Town of Davie was first incorporated and people started planting orange groves. Davie began to produce some of the best citrus fruit in the state, thanks to its warm weather, rich soil and plentiful water supply.

Local farmers started the first festival as a way to celebrate their success in the orange industry and to honor the orange as the product that made Davie famous. The first festival consisted of a public picnic with fruit stands that farmers set up on the banks of the C-11 Canal along Davie's southern border. As the festival grew, a rodeo event was added to the program of festivities to recognize the town's expanding cattle ranches in the 1950s.

When Davie was at its agricultural peak in the late 1950s, the town had more than 5,000 acres of citrus-bearing groves, valued at more than $5 million. By the 1960s, the Davie Chamber of Commerce organized the festival into an annual celebration designed to showcase both the town’s citrus and rural products. In those days, hundreds of bushels of oranges were given away for free and hundreds of gallons of orange juice were sold for just 5 cents per glass. After the suburban boom of the 1970s, the land became too expensive for agriculture and cattle operations and today the cattle ranches and orange groves are just a memory that is rekindled once each year by the current Orange Blossom Festival celebrations.