Lue Gim Gong and the DeLand Orange That Won the Wilder Medal

In 1911 the American Pomological Society gave its Wilder Medal to a citrus fruit for the first time. The orange had been bred in a DeLand grove by Lue Gim Gong, a Chinese immigrant who had come to Florida twenty-five years earlier with the family of the woman who taught him English.

North Adams to DeLand

Lue was born in southern China around 1857 and came to the United States as a teenager, in years when anti-Chinese feeling ran high. He found work in North Adams, Massachusetts, where Fannie Burlingame taught him to read and got him interested in plant breeding. When the Burlingames moved to DeLand in December 1886, he went with them.

The Orange

The freezes of the 1890s wiped out groves across the state, and Lue set out to breed a fruit that could take the cold. He crossed a hardy Florida orange with a Mediterranean variety, and after years of trials he had an orange that held on the tree through cold snaps that ruined ordinary crops. It carried his name. He bred cold-tolerant grapefruit too.

Lue Gim Gong died in DeLand on June 3, 1925, without having made much money from any of it.