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Highlands Today

Maxwell Groves Is Last Of Its Kind In County

JASMINA MEYER/Highlands Today

Steve Maxwell, owner of Maxwell Grove Service,Inc., provides commercial and gift fruit packaging in Avon Park. Maxwell took over the business his father started in 1935 and completed building the packing house in 1969. He still lives next door in his family's home built in 1926.

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By LAURA NESBITT

Highlands Today

Published: March 13, 2009

AVON PARK - Steve Maxwell didn't really understand much about the equipment that he was buying back in 1968, but it became the machinery for Maxwell Groves, which is the last registered packing house in Highlands County.

"All I remember when I started building was that I had no idea what I was doing - none," Maxwell said about the fruit packing business.

Maxwell took some time on Thursday to talk about the history of his family and business in Avon Park. When he got out of the Air Force in 1966, Maxwell said he heard that Keen Fruit was going out of business. He went by to look for a better fruit washing unit for his father, Thomas. But the 21-year-old ended up buying about $5,200 worth of 30-year-old packing equipment.

"There was no grand plan," Maxwell said.

"The only packing house that I'd ever been into in my life was up at Frostproof. I just loved it - the machinery running and the smell and all."

Maxwell looked out over the machinery he bought over 40 years ago that fills the operating area of Maxwell Groves. The main concentration of his business now is gift fruit and retail fruit sales. The smell of citrus wafted in the warm air. Store worker Albina Rivas' broom scraped water over the concrete floor. Rivas works for Maxwell doing cleaning, making juice and packing fruit.

Maxwell's grandparents, Charlie and Bertha, moved to Avon Park from Georgia in the beginning of the 1920s during the area's economic boom.

"They came here because Florida was going to make them rich. They came down here and bought land and groves." Maxwell said during the 1920s and 1930s fruit was picked in mule-drawn carts, and there were three packing houses in Avon Park near the railroad.

Unfortunately his grandparents lost everything they had during the Depression years. His father, Thomas, dropped out of school in Georgia and came back to help his father out. Thomas and his wife, Leoma, who wrote a history of Avon Park, had four children and lived in the house next to Maxwell Groves.
Thomas Maxwell worked as a grove caretaker for other business owners, and operated "labor camps" across the street from where the building stands, Maxwell said about his father.

"He brought in offshore labor to pick fruit," Maxwell explained.

"He would buy beef on the hoof and hogs on the hoof. He would butcher them and then mother would cut them up. There was a cook tent with a big tin roof on it" where the workers would eat.
Steve Maxwell said he still lives in the two-story house built in 1926 next door to the company, although he remodeled it when he got married in 1967.

The Maxwell Groves building was a dirt-floor equipment shed in disrepair when he got home from the service. But in its heyday, when it was fully operational, the packing house employed about 17 people. About half that number work at the business now.

"I would love for one of my children to take it on, but I don't see it," Maxwell said about his plans for the future.

"I've never thought that far ahead. I've never considered myself as having the luxury of looking too far down the road. I operate on gut instinct," Maxwell said.

Highlands Today reporter Laura Nesbitt can be reached at 863-368-5857 or lnesbitt@highlandstoday.com.

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