I've copied a page from the 1897 edition of Rivers Nursery catalogue.
You can see it at
http://www.homecitrusgrowers.co.uk/rivers/rivers1897catalogue.html
The group of oranges referred to as 'St. Michael's' originate from the island of that name in the Portuguese Azores. Oranges were exported from there to Great Britain in the 1800's.
Mike aka Citrange

Thanks for sharing this page-it is rather fascinating to be able to get a glimpse of yesteryear to discover that many of the joys of today our grandparents also had access to-though I would think that only the wealthy in England during the 1800's could afford to play with citrus. I am curious how much they cost and the expense of greenhouses back then.

In the catalogue a Jaffa orange tree is priced at 7s 6d (pre-decimal: 7 shillings and 6 pence) which is about £0.40, or 20 US cents at today's exchange rates. I checked the UK inflation since 1887 is around 75 times, so the tree price would have been equivalent to $15. Just about right. Interestingly, all the price inflation has taken place since 1915 - before that prices were completely stable.
Rivers Nursery failed partly because it did not adapt to changing times. It relied on supplying the big English estates which themselves declined rapidly after the first World War. It never saw the need to change from field grown to potted plant production which permitted year-round sales to smaller gardens.
There is an interesting brief history of the nursery at
http://www.riversnurseryorchard.org.uk/Rivers%20Time%20Line3.htm
and an old page from my website has some Rivers citrus photos at
http://www.saalfelds.freeserve.co.uk/MyCollection.htm
Mike

Inflation is a powerful method of taxing everyone. Government prints and prints more money to spend, so the rest of the constituent's value of their money gets diluted, and thus we have inflation. That's just one causes of inflation, and a major one cause when all the world's governments just prints more money into circulation. So if you have an indestructible property like land, it would naturally avoid such inflation as it remains the same piece of land regardless of amount of money printed, and so the value would increase in terms of inflated currency. In order to get your fair share of suffering, the government invented property tax, so that everyone can be taxed from these inflationary practices.

The taxes are on top of sales, VAT, income taxes, federal, state, etc, and ... some of them, they are not called taxes, we call them fees, fines, insurance, etc.

Not to mention that the banks are in cahoots with the government to help do balancing act of controlling inflation, as the poor have not's labor demand back their buying power.

Interesting post Citrange. This is the first time I have heard of the St. Michaels Orange as a group of oranges with different characteristics.
This was one of the leading Oranges in the State of Arizona when plantings were made in the Phoenix Arizona area in the 1890's, and I have always assumed that it was a variety as opposed to a grouping. Freezes and better choices in the last 110 years have made the variety extinct here and almost everywhere else I have asked. I have a cataloque from 1879, from the Manville Nursery, Drayton Island, Florida. E.H and A.H. Manville were leaders in the early days of Florida Citrus. It is interesting to compare the Rivers description to the description from their catalogue.

Paraphrased from your post:
VARIETIES OF ORANGES RECEIVED FROM ST. MICHAEL'S, &c.
ST. MICHAEL'S. The ordinary orange of commerce, thin skinned, large and well flavoured
BOTELHA
DULCISSIMA
EXQUISITE
EGG

From Manvilles 1879 Catalogue:
St. Michaels (egg)- A large, thick rinded, oval orange: remarkedly juicy but not rich: a great bearer. Imported from the Island of St. Michaels, and not fruited in Florida.
Botelha- A variety from Mr. Rivers, the well known nurseryman of Sawbridgeworth, England. Fruit said to be of superior quality, having a thin rind and rich pulp.
Dulcissima- Synonym Dulcis. Fruit small, very sweet, generally seedless. A prolific bearer. Well known in Paris. Imported by Mr. A.L Bidwell, Jacksonville, Florida.
Exquisite- A thin rinded juicy fruit. A variety from Rivers, not yet fruited in Florida.

One day upon getting access to a scanner I would like to copy a few pages of the citrus descriptions found in their 20 page catalogue. It would be interesting to see how many varieties could be found elsewhere. Most can't be found at the budwood groves in the Americas.

Thanks Patrick for that valuable reply.
I hunted around for more information about 'Manvilles 1879 Catalogue' and discovered that UCLA Riverside's library has beaten you by providing an excellent online copy of this booklet. It is available in several different download or viewing formats from
http://www.archive.org/details/newguidetoorange00manvrich
I have printed a copy which I am now going to sit down with a cup of tea and read through!
Mike/Citrange

Citrange,
I found my copy at The Stetson University Library, buried and bound into an old engineering manual! I dont have a link to it, but it has been properly cared for now. The one you provided is a real asset. The location of that Nursery is very unique. It is on the St. Johns River, which at the time was the Freeway for Steamships into the heart of Florida. Now just accessing Drayton Island could be considered a small journey, unless you have a good boat which can navigate the dangers of Lake George. As a young kid some 30 miles from there, I remember some local farmers who cultivated odd named trees that were 40 feet tall with trunks as big as small chimney pipes. The freeze of 1985 killed them all. It was a sad winter for the local residents, as these trees had become a part of the communities identity. Being in the northern range of Florida's citrus belt, most who remain replanted with either Mandarins, or Hamlin or Parson Brown Sweet orange.
Im glad you shared that site with us! Patrick

I've now read through the book/catalogue.
Two things struck me particularly.
The first was the reference to Florida's "native" sour oranges. I hadn't realised these trees - presumably originally introduced by the Spanish - had become widely naturalised in Florida.
Second, I always believed that the Bahia navel orange (later renamed Washington Navel) was first widely distributed in USA from its introduction into California around 1873. However, I now know it had already been growing in Florida much earlier:
"The best variety grown for general cultivation. Origin, Bahia, Brazil.
It was introduced in 1835, by J. D. Browne, author of " Trees of America,"
and planted in the grove of Z. Kingsley, on Drayton Island, Lake
George, Fla. It was also imported by Mr Parsons in 1869, and has since
been widely disseminated throughout the State."
I don't know how much direct communication there was between Florida and California at that time. But it seems is a little strange that the navel variety had to be re-introduced from Brazil to Washington and then California, when it was already widespread in Florida!
Mike/Citrange

Thomas Rivers (1798-1877) and the Valencia Orange.

Valencia oranges are one of the most widespread orange varieties, cultivated in both Florida and California in vast amounts. However, the name is very misleading. These oranges did not originate in Valencia, which is on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, but rather is native of China. They were brought to Europe by Spanish and Portuguese voyagers. The Valencia cultivar that we know today is MUCH MORE PORTUGUESE than it is Valencia Spanish, because of the English nurseryman Mr. Thomas Rivers. In the early 1860s, Mr. Rivers of Sawbridgeworth imported the Valencia sweet orange from the Azores and begun offering it for sale through his catalog under the name Excelsior. Rivers and his orange crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States in 1870, where he provided trees to both S.B. Parsons (a Long Island nurseryman) and to Mr. A.B. Chapman of San Gabriel, California. The Florida connection came about when Parsons shipped some of the trees to E. H. Hart in Federal Point, Florida. Mr. Hart again renamed the orange and commercialized it under his own name, as Hart's Tardiff, in 1877. By that time, the competition between California and Florida for control of the northeastern U.S. citrus market was already fierce. The first train carload of Valencia oranges sipped to eastern markets (in the same year, 1877) came from California by Mr. J.R. Dobbins of San Gabriel. In the meantime, Chapman had also ONCE AGAIN renamed the fruit, but not after himself. A Spanish visitor had pronounced it similar to another late maturing variety, from the Valencia area, and so the Valencia orange received its name at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. NOTE: if you look in Mr. Thomas Rivers early catalog you will find the "Valencia" orange titled as Excelsior. (Citrus A History - Pierre Laszlo)

_________________
Millet (Laus Deo)

Citrange said................"it seems a little strange that the navel variety had to be re-introduced from Brazil to Washington and then California, when it was already widespread in Florida!"......................

It was not re-introduced from Brazil. In the aftermath of the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the U.S. Civil War, numerous Easterners moved and settled in California. Often, they came as groups of families that together founded a colony. As a rule such groups were united by a religious creed or some other shared ideal. One of these groups was led by Mr. John North, a militant abolitionist from upstate New York who came to California in 1870 and founded a utopian colony in the Riverside Valley of California. Fellow colonists Luther and Eliza Tibbets had grown tired of the cold, rough winters in the Northeast. In 1873, Eliza wrote a letter to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, DC. She asked for advice on trees to plant in her front yard that might thrive in the California climate. She was sent three seedling of the "umbigo Bahia" orange which was originally from Brazil. Eliza planted the trees. One was trampled by a cow, but the other two prospered. Legend has it that she used her dishwater to water them: Luther Tibbets was to lazy or too cheap to install irrigation. One of these two tree still survives in downtown Riverside at the Intersection of Magnolia and Arlington avenues. Citrus Joe and I have personally visited this tree. Eliza served her oranges at a housewarming party, and they were an instant sensation. She started a mail-order business, selling budwood at five cents a bud, according to some records, and up to five dollars each, according to others. Eliza Tibbets, a Queen Victoria look alike, made money and became very influential. Her three orange trees were the foundation of citriculture in California, first in Riverside and later in the whole citrus belt extending from Pasadena to Riverside.

ENGLISH CONNECTION; Eliza Tibbets shares the credit for starting navel orange cultivation in California with the man who sent her those three trees. William Saunders (1822-1900), a Scotsman and a botanist who trained at Kew Gardens in London, came to the United States in his mid twenties. He owned nurseries and was a landscape architect in the Washington area. He designed many parks in the eastern United States, including the military cemetery at Gettysburg. In 1862, Mr. Saunders was appointed botanist and superintendent of horticulture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and served a long tenure at the USDA. Saunders had a seminal role in citrus cultivation. In 1869, he introduced Poncirus trifoliata, the Japanese hardy bitter orange, and of course he sent those "umbigo Bahia" oranges renamed Washington Navel Oranges (because of their original introduction into the United States through the USDA in Washington DC), to Eliza Tibbets. (Citrus A History - Pierre Laszlo)

From my understanding of the events, Saunders received those navels direct from Bahia, Brazil, in 1870. All I was trying to say was that the same variety was in fact already growing in Florida.
The Citrus Industry says:
Although early introduced (1835) and planted extensively in Florida, this variety has proven to have only limited commercial value there. It tends to produce poorly and the fruit is generally large, coarse-textured, and of poor quality. It is clearly not well adapted to hot, semitropical climates.

In 2002 I also visited the parent Washinton Navel in Riverside, and even ate some oranges from it! See
Parent Washinton Navel
Mike/Citrange

Citrange,
You've got me into this topic!
Apparently the native americans would eat and cook with the citrus fruit, and the seeds easily germinated and thrived along the waterways of Florida and its light, loamy soils. It so happens that the the villages were near waterways, which no doubt gave the trees the advantage of a microclimate. I can only imagine they knew the value of citrus, and planted the seeds as opposed to simply dropping them as they ate the fruit. Alot of the older groves in the 1800's were worked over sour orange groves, or they transplanted them so that today there are very few sour oranges growing in a wild, voluntary way that I know of. Pulling and transplanting sour orange tree stumps from natural stands was a common practice fro early settlers.
If Im not mistaken, there was a pretty heavy freeze around 1836 in Florida. I have always made the assumption that freeze, and the fact that there just weren't that many people in the citrus growing areas of Florida at this time, led to the dissapearance of the navel orange for a while. This was around the time that the Native people were being sent to Oklahoma. Parson, the nursery man from New York, had a Florida nursery in Orange Ciy, Florida, close to where I grew up according to the local history books in the late 1800's. If he was sending varieties out west, they were no doubt present in Florida, in my humble opinion.

Another side bit: the navel orange might be a little lighter in bearing tree than in the western states, but a navel orange from Florida is still extremely sweet and one of my favorite fruit. Calling the Florida navel inferior to me is simply a matter of opinion. The rind color is not the same and the sugar content might be slightly less, but the amount of juice and size compensate for that. Some are so big you can make a meal out of it!
Patrick

Mike, you could well be correct about Florida. My meaning is that Mrs. Tibbits's tree was not reintroduced into California directly from Brazil. It was sent to California from the USDA in Washington DC. On what exact date the USDA received the tree is not listed in my records. Just to let the membership know, who have not been to Riverside, California to see the parent Washington Navel Orange tree planted by Mrs. Tibbets, but have looked at the link to your web page, that you so graciously posted above, or seen a picture of the tree in the book "The Citrus Industry", the tree is not growing in a park like setting. The tree is actually growing down town Riverside in a very small triangle piece of land located in the middle the intersection of three very busy streets. It is therefore bounded very closely by the streets, with cars running back and forth just feet from the tree.

If we look closely at the Robert Hodgson account
of the Bahia and the Washington Navel we can
see some agreed upon assumptions that people
had to try to mesh parts of the puzzle together.
We have no real physical proof of anything other
than the old tree that is still left standing that
became the parent line plant for much of the
Washington Navels in this state and elsewhere.

Years ago I was told there were three parental
lines for Navels in this state. We know of the
Riverside introduction as being one of them.
No one refutes this as it has been documented
that the Tibbet's tree is the source plant for
which people at the Riverside Experimental
Station used as their wood and seed source
plant. The problem arises in that there is
no documentation in the Citrus Industry
books Vol. 1 and Vol. 5 of the Spanish
introduced trees from Mexico that were
started at various California Missions
upon their founding. We forget that some
of the Missions did have Oranges that had
grown on the claimed grounds and some
of them were Navels. We also have no
account of the various goings on in and
outside the port of San Francisco which
in the 1800's was our principal port of
entry for a lot of things into this state.
We do not know which Mandarins came
in from China or Japan and we have no
way of knowing for sure if any Navel
production Oranges were being shipped
out from that port. All we have from the
two Citrus Industry volumes are the
Southern California accounts.

Patrick hit on something that we do
not always remember in that one line
of Navel Orange does get quite large
in size compared to the other two lines
of Navels we have in this state. When
Mr. Hodgson in Chapter 4, Vol. 1 of
the Citrus Industry mentions Baianinha
Piracicaba and I read the description
I automatically sense the Cara Cara.
That description in no way resembles
the Washington Navel we grow and
our tree does not match up to the
Tibbet's line plant either just by the
size of the fruit and the "a small and
rudimentary secondary fruit embedded
in the apex of the primary fruit". Ours
has a more pronounced Navel than the
parent line Washington Navel has and
there were other trees in Northern
California years ago that also had
the much more pronounced Navel.
Also, this same line peels much
more freely than either the Baianinha
Piracicaba (Cara Cara like) line and
the Tibbet's line plants do and has a
thicker rind (peel) than either but
not that much of a thicker albedo
inside the peel. The fruit segments
are much larger in size than either
of the two other Navels as well.
Another thing that has always
bothered me when I read about
chimeras in Washington Navels
and frequent branch sports is that in
50 years of having our trees, I've never
seen either on our fruit or in our trees.
Yes, we have an experimental version
of Washington Navel that we have
been growing but other older trees
in the upper North (North of Kern
County with Bakersfield being the
dividing line) have also not shown
the frequency of chimera fruit or a
series of occasional branch sports in
the limbs. Thus, one parental line
of Navel is much more genetically
stable a tree than the other two lines
are.

A series of questions about the Bahia
that I still have had for a while remain
unanswered: how long has the Bahia
been in Brazil, how did it get there?
Was it in of itself a selected seedling
or did it come about as a branch sport
and possibly allowed to go to seed and
was found nestled nearby a parent plant?
We know of another trading partner
with Brazil that goes way back in time
as well as Portugal that had access to
Oranges coming in from Portugal,
Spain and Italy, thus how can anyone
say for certain that the Bahia is in fact
of Portuguese origin when it may have
been introduced from the Netherlands
from Italy and was later called Bahia
in Brazil?

Mike, thanks for the links you provided.
You may be right that the Bahia may
have been reintroduced but what is not
known if this is true, was it the same
form plant? My thinking is that it was
not the same plant or the same clone
and that it is possible that we may have
had the Bahia or the tree that produced
it here before Florida had it. I am
not about to get in a tit for tat game
with Florida Citrus. They do what
they have to do and we do what we
have to out here. I never have felt
we were in competition with Florida
but were a partner in Citrus growing
along with the Florida growers.

Jim

Jim, in my personal library there is a book with an account of the origin of the Bahia Navel Orange. Originally, the navel was a sweet orange in Portugal by the name of "Seleta", or "Selecta". It was brought to Brazil, where, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, a chance hybridization produced a limb sport. A structure at one end of the fruit, similar in appearance to a navel, led to this novel variant being named umbigo, which is the Portuguese word for "navel". Outside of Brazil, it came to be known as Bahia, after the Brazilian state. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, travelers to Brazil commented on this unusual fruit: it was easy to peel, its segments separated readily, and it was juicy and sweet. Two Germans, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, a physician and botanist, and his zoologist colleague, Johann Baptist van Spix, noted in 1817 the same excellence of both Seleta and Umbigo. The umbigo (Navel) is seedless because the tree produces no pollen and few ovules. Accordingly, the tree has to be grafted onto other varieties.