Lue Gim Gong

Chinese-born horticulturist

• Pronunciation: LEW-ee
• Born: ca. 1858
• Birthplace: Lung On, Guangdong, China
• Died: June 3, 1925
• Place of death: DeLand, Florida

A horticulturist without any formal scientific education, Lue used practical breeding methods to cultivate citrus trees that could withstand the temperature extremes that threatened the citrus industry. He is best known for his award-winning Lue Gim Gong or Lue orange, a particularly hardy strain of Valencia orange.

Areas of achievement: Science and technology

Early Life

Lue Gim Gong was born around 1858 in Lung On, a town in southern China. His parents were agriculturists who tended a farm and orchard near their village. Lue learned horticultural techniques from his mother, who was skilled in grafting plants and cross-pollinating varieties. Lue immigrated to the United States around 1870, after an uncle returned from San Francisco, California, and told the family about opportunities in the United States. He sailed to California and worked there for several years before traveling by train to North Adams, Massachusetts, to take a job at a shoe factory owned by manufacturer Calvin T. Sampson. There, he met Sunday school teacher Fanny Burlingame, who taught immigrants Bible stories and English. Lue cultivated plants in Burlingame’s garden and greenhouse, sharing the horticultural skills he had learned in China.

Confronted by racism, much of it due to local residents’ anger that Asian immigrants had secured shoemaking jobs instead of citizens, Lue worked to assimilate into the society of North Adams, wearing Western clothing, converting to Christianity, and attending the local First Baptist Church. He was eventually granted US citizenship. In 1880, Lue left the shoe factory and moved into Burlingame’s home, continuing to work in the garden.

Life’s Work

In the 1880s, Lue began to accompany Burlingame on trips to her property near DeLand, Florida. Lue grew fruit crops on her land, particularly oranges. Deep freezes in December 1894 and February 1895 exposed fruit trees to historically low temperatures and ice, killing the majority of the state’s citrus trees. The trees Lue cultivated did not survive, and he was forced to replant the grove. Following Burlingame’s death in 1903, Lue acquired her property in Florida.

Lue became a full-time fruit farmer and focused on horticultural endeavors, seeking to develop orange trees that would produce crops in fall, after the end of the traditional harvesting period, and allow growers to earn more money. He experimented with crossing orange varieties, particularly Mediterranean Sweet and Hart’s Late, in an attempt to produce frost-resistant trees. Using cross-pollination techniques, by 1911 he had created an orange hybrid that displayed the qualities he sought. Originally named Lue Gim Gong, the strain of orange became known simply as Lue due to American Pomological Society (APS) rules limiting fruit names to one word. The plant was later revealed to be not a hybrid but a strain of the popular Valencia variety of orange.

Lue’s orange, hardier in cold weather than other varieties, received accolades from growers and industry leaders. The APS honored Lue by presenting his orange with a Wilder Silver Medal in 1911. The Glen Saint Mary Nurseries began to sell the Lue orange in 1912, and the 1913 Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture praised the sturdiness of Lue’s orange in market transportation.

Despite chronic health problems, Lue continued to experiment with breeding other fruits, flowers, and vegetables, creating a grapefruit with an appealing scent and also growing tangerines and lemons. Encountering financial difficulties, which he attributed to deceitful practices on the part of growers and the distributors of his trees, Lue became unable to pay his debts and risked losing his property. However, friends and strangers provided him with financial assistance following his publication of a letter explaining his situation in the January 31, 1917, issue of Florida Grower. Both mainstream and industry magazines and newspapers published urgent requests to help Lue financially in the early 1920s. Lue died on June 3, 1925, in DeLand and was buried in that community’s Oakdale Cemetery. His obituaries, printed in newspapers throughout the United States, noted the significant effects of his horticultural achievements on the citrus industry.

Significance

Lue’s orange-breeding experiments immediately benefited Florida’s citrus industry in the early twentieth century. Growers who had suffered orchard losses due to freezing weather were able to invest in Lue’s hardier orange trees, which aided agriculturists and local and state economies in achieving financial stability and growth. A bust of Lue was displayed in the Florida Pavilion at the 1940 World’s Fair, calling attention to his significant accomplishments. The Lue orange continued to be praised for its hardiness and cultivated into the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Lee, Anthony W. A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. Examines the industrial community in which Lue lived and worked after arriving in the United States, comments on domestic and legal aspects of his life, and includes a photograph of Lue in 1876.

McCunn, Ruthanne Lum. Wooden Fish Songs. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Print. Reveals through the scholarly introduction by King-Kok Cheung and the author’s afterword how historical research, including contacts with Lue’s relatives and access to legal and genealogical records, provided facts for this novel featuring Lue.

Mohl, Raymond A. “Asian Immigration to Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 74.3 (1996): 261–86. Print. Discusses Lue in the context of Chinese immigrants who pursued agricultural work, particularly operating truck farms to provide produce to markets in Florida and the Northeast.