Two hats.

I was working today with two hats on; my historian hat which is sooo 19th Century, and my 21st Century "Economic Panic" hat. Then I ran across the following in my notes and they seemed as one:

"Here everything is closed out and for a good many years. The trees have almost all of them to be grown again from the roots, and so we are put back where we were 10 - to 12 years ago, with all the money we put into the groves, gone... Many of the best people, who were in comfortable circumstances before the freeze, are now really very poor... It is estimated that one-third of the people of Florida have already left the state and many, many more are still going, and still more would go, if they could..."

The above is from a letter penned by Cornelius H. Longstreet from Mt. Dora, Florida on 17 July 1895. He was writing about the economic aftermath of two hard freezes the previous winter that virtually wiped out the once-promising citrus industry in central Florida and left the area economically devastated for a number of years. Conditions were so bad that Florida witnessed the very rare event of a declining population. There is some convincing circumstantial evidence that it is happening again, as public school enrollment has dropped for three consecutive years.