DAFFODIL FESTIVAL COUNCIL & PARKS, RECREATION AND TOURISM
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
A short history
of the significance of the daffodil
to Gloucester County, Virginia
Originally compiled by Carol Ray, 1991,
updated by Denise Rhea Carter 2010.
Initial funding provided by The Five River’s
Woman's Club with proceeds to be used for
county beautification projects sponsored by
the Daffodil Festival Committee.
All rights reserved 1991, 2010.
Daffodil Festival Council & Parks, Recreation and Tourism
6467 Main Street
Gloucester, VA 23061
804-693-2355
www.gloucesterva.info/pr
a message to our readers
As genuine admirers of the daffodil and its
significant role in the industrial and cultural
heritage of Gloucester County, we wish to share
the basis of this admiration in an effort to draw
others into our company.
You will meet the men and women of
Gloucester's past who saw beauty and bounty in
the daffodil and turned that vision into a
prospering reality. You will follow the cultural
response of a community proud of its
accomplishments. And, as you are reminded of
the presence of both in our county today, it is
our hope that you will join us as we preserve the
past by celebrating the present.
We are dedicated to the perpetual beautification
of Gloucester County, centered around the
daffodil, our adopted symbol of hope and
prosperity, that reminds us each spring of its
simple yet inspiring nature.
The Daffodils Arrive
The history of the daffodil in Gloucester County,
Virginia is almost as old as the county itself. When
Gloucester was formed in 1651 from part of York
County the early settlers brought these soft reminders
of English springs as they established themselves in the
area. The soil and weather conditions were ideal for
daffodils. The bulbs were passed from neighbor to
neighbor and spread from the orderly beds and
burying grounds of the great houses to the fields.
Some, such as the hardy Trumpet Major variety,
seemed to thrive on neglect. By the beginning of the
20th century daffodils grew wild in the untended
fields of Gloucester. It is from this abundance of
natural beauty that grew the extensive daffodil
industry which earned the county the title "Daffodil
Capital of America" in the 1930s and 40s.
The 1991 Daffodil Festival Book Committee,
Kim Williams, Linda Hamilton,
Carol Ray, Kate Zullo
First Daffodil Festival Logo,
designed by Carol Ray
Current Daffodil Festival Logo,
designed by Denise Rhea Carter
Photos courtesy of National Geographic Magazine
Early Entrepreneurs
Everyone had daffodils but no one thought much
about them except as wild ornaments. It was around
1890 that Eleanor Linthicum Smith, of "Toddsbury"
on the North River, first saw the commercial potential
of daffodils. She developed a good size bed of flowers
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
and paid local children ten cents per hundred to pick
them. The flowers were picked during their spring
growing season, packed standing up in laundry
baskets covered with cheesecloth, and shipped to
Baltimore.
Toddsbury, begun after 1650
The Middle Peninsula never had a railroad and that is
why, until adequate roads and bridges were built, the
people of the area were linked culturally and
commercially to Baltimore and Norfolk. The
Chesapeake Bay provided a thoroughfare with
steamboats stopping at the many docks located on
the rivers in the area.
And so, Mrs. Smith's baskets of flowers were loaded
on a hayrack - one hundred baskets with about
2,500 blooms - and hauled by horse to nearby
Dixondale Wharf or Hockley Wharf on the North
River. They were put on a steamboat and shipped to
her son who worked in Baltimore's Union Station.
He resold the flowers to depot newsboys who
became the first daffodil retailers.
The profit from her daffodil sales eventually paid off
the mortgage on her home. Aware of their value,
she dug up the bulbs and transported them with her
when she moved to nearby "Holly Hill". As word of
the success of the business spread, others in the
county began to take an interest in the cultivation of
flowers. Mrs. Smith's granddaughter Eleanor and her
husband, W.S. Field, later lived at "Holly Hill" and
continued with the daffodil business. They were able
to put five children through college between 1925
and 1945 on the profits.
Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Snowden Hopkins of
"Waverley" on the North River were influenced by
their neighbor, Mrs. Smith, and began cultivation
around 1915. By the 1920s they were extensively into
shipping flowers and bulbs from their River's Edge
Flower Farm. Their plantings were based on improved
varieties of bulbs from the Netherlands. Mr. Hopkins
became a specialist in daffodil farming and they were
major growers by the 1930s. Mr. Hopkins died in
1937 but Mrs. Hopkins along with her daughter and
son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Hammer, continued
with the management of the business.
Another entrepreneur, Mr. Allan Hicks, bought
bulbs from Mrs. Smith and specialized in the
shipment of cut flowers. He accompanied the flower
shipments on the steamboat and developed better
methods of packing them to keep the blooms from
being crushed. Instead of standing upright in laundry
baskets he had the flowers bundled and laid
horizontally in wooden boxes which could be reused.
Eventually the boxes were made of fiberboard. At
one time Mr. Hicks had flower farms not only in
Gloucester, but in North Carolina and elsewhere
along the east coast.
Until the mid1920s the daffodil
business
was
substantial
but
never large, with the
Smith's,
Field's,
Hopkins, and Hicks
being the major
growers.
Charles Heath, son
of a wealthy New
England family, had
a major impact on
the direction in
which the daffodil
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
industry eventually evolved in Gloucester County.
His interest in the area began with a delicious
cantaloupe which was to serve him in the early
1900s. He traced its source to "Elmington", the
Gloucester estate of Thomas Dixon, author and
gentleman farmer. Heath placed orders for more
cantaloupes and began a correspondence with Dixon,
which resulted in his coming to Gloucester for a visit.
While here, Charles Heath looked out over the fields
of wild daffodils and found inspiration. He decided
to move to the area and established his family at
"Auburn" plantation across the North River. Around
1915 he began importing and improving fine daffodil
bulbs from M. Van Waveren and Sons, a large New
York importing house. Each year Mr. Heath sent
sample offspring back to the Dutch firm and reported
his success with the bulbs in the Virginia soil. For
years he tried to interest neighboring farmers to
plant better bulbs but most were content to gather
the wild daffodils and send them to market by
steamboat.
The Peak Years
Until 1926 Dutch bulbs
dominated the eastern
market, other than in
Baltimore. It was in that
year the biggest boost
came to the Virginia
industry
when
a
microscopic
worm
infested the bulbs in
Holland resulting in an embargo of foreign bulbs by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Dutch firm of M. Van Waveren and Sons needed
a new supplier of bulbs and turned to Charles Heath
for help. They leased his 300 acres at "Auburn" and
several were brought in to oversee the cultivation but
they did not understand the local labor force and
were unable to successfully handle them. Mr. Heath's
son, George, came home and was enlisted to take
over the enterprise.
George Heath was and excellent manager and learned
everything he could about bulb farming. Other
growers saw the light and thus was born one of the
biggest industries in Gloucester's history. The
$20,000 payroll provided by the daffodil business
helped to fill many depression pockets.
After the Wall Street Crash the daffodil became
known as "the poor man's rose". The few dollars
asked for a bunch of daffodils was affordable
compared to the cost of a bunch of roses. Between
the wars, due to the rapid development of motor
freight, the daffodil industry grew and flourished.
More and better varieties were planted and produced
because of the great demand for them.
Map of daffodil farms in Gloucester and Mathews in 1939,
taken from the 1939 Daffodil Tour Guide.
There was much discussion in the business as to the
best methods of planting, picking, bundling,
watering, and packing. Rubber bands replaced rags,
raffia, and string for bunching fiberboard boxes
replaced laundry baskets and slat crates. There was a
rush in the spring to harvest the blossoms by midday, pack them, and hurry the fragile crop to trucks
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
by day's end. Bulbs were dug in July and replanted in
the fall. Enough money could be made by some
during the season to last the rest of the year. The soil
and climate of the area led to the domination of
daffodil cultivation for cut flowers and bulbs along
the east coast. Every year between the two world wars
and for a few years after the second, this industry sent
as many as 50,000 boxes to metropolitan wholesale
markets from Baltimore, to the north and west.
During the peak years of daffodil production
hundreds of visitors would travel to Gloucester and
Mathews Counties to view the golden fields of
daffodils. The area was widely referred to as the
"Daffodil Capital of America". The industry attracted
enough attention for a Fox Movietone news release
Blooming Season Hard to Predict
After three annual daffodil tours the local committee
still is and probably always will be unable to predict with
complete accuracy just when the most daffodils will be in
bloom. The whims of Mother Nature, like those of a
temperamental prima donna, simply cannot be
anticipated.
The best the committee can do is to give dates (covering
a period of about 10 days) during which it seems
probable most of the daffodil fields will be in bloom,
always with the reservation that the peak of the short
season may come a week earlier or later than the dates
set for the tour.
When this happens, however,
newspapers and radio stations cooperate in broadcasting
the new s of any change in the advertised dates.
Indicating the difficult of predicting when the flower
season will be a its height one grower submits the
following table, giving the first shipment of early King
Alfreds and the last shipments of the late Emperors:
1940 March 30 to April 22
1939 March 7 to April 4
1938 March 4 to March 28
1937 March 9 to April 13
1936 Mach 21 to April 13
1935 March 16 to April 10
1934 March 28 to April 21
1933 March 10 to April 10
1932 February 16 to April 4
(from the 1941 Daffodil Tour Guide)
in 1940 and an
article in the May,
1942
issue
of
National Geographic
magazine.
In about 1937 the
embargo was lifted
and M. Van Waveren
and Sons left. It was
at this time that
George Heath went
into business for
himself
and
an
association was formed with other local growers. The
Gloucester-Mathews Narcissus Association was
mentioned in the Gazette-Journal in 1938. The
association began to import bulbs from England and
Holland. Heath acclimatized the bulbs and made
them available to amateur growers.
Despite renewed competition from abroad, the local
producers carried on until almost everyone in
Gloucester and neighboring Mathews was raising
flowers, including two local growers who were raising
bulbs for sale. In 1938, M&G Trucking Company was
at the height of the season transporting roughly
120,000 daffodils a day from approximately 30 local
farms.
It was reported that the continued success of
Gloucester daffodils in the competitive market was
due in part to the early availability of some varieties.
In 1938, George Heath established the Daffodil Mart
on land bordering Back Creek in Gloucester. Heath
fell in love with the work and experimented with all
the varieties he could get. He is credited with having
brought more different varieties into this country
than anyone else and, by 1952, had a total of 1400
varieties. He eventually developed a mail order bulb
business with national and international sales.
The Slow Decline
World War II briefly cut off the supply of foreign
bulbs, restricted transportation, and severely limited
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
the labor force, but after the war, daffodil growing
resumed with a vengeance. New plantings were
started, a wholesale florist opened, greenhouses were
put up to force blooms earlier, and a cold room was
built at the freight terminal where daffodils were
processed and shipped by the thousands daily. In the
late 40s, visitors were still coming at the peak of the
growing season to travel the "Daffodil Trail" through
Gloucester and Mathews Counties.
Ultimately, more than 150 families were growing
flowers. Eventually this overproduction, rising costs,
and competition from cut flowers brought in by air
freight from around the globe caused prices to fall. A
slow decline began as daffodil farming was
abandoned by many.
The business had settled by the mid-50s and there
was still some profit in cut flowers. When the blooms
appeared the pickers would flock in. Schools let out
so that the children could join them, and up to $20 a
day could be earned in the fields. The season meant
additional spending money to youngsters and adults
who picked and to farm families with small patches of
flowers.
This photo appeared in the May 1942 National Geographic
with the following caption ““ When All at Once I Saw a Cloud,
a Host, of Golden Daffodils” - Wordsworth. Costumed pickers
invade this field near Gloucester, to mark the opening of the
daffodil season. Here the yellow trumpets, one of the many
division of the narcissus family, are grown commercially. The
variety in these rows is of modern origin, developed by
horticulturists. Kodachrome by B. Anthony Stewart”
This photo appeared in the May 1942 National Geographic
with this caption “ Since Early Colonial Days Old-fashioned
Daffodils Have Bloomed in Tidewater Virginia. This variety on
the Pig Hill estate is particularly valued because it is so old.
Fields of yellow trumpets burst into bloom each spring in
Gloucester County—Kodachrome by B. Anthony Stewart
Prominent names in the daffodil industry in the 50s
included Heath, Hicks, Hammer, Hopkins, Emory,
and Clements. Businesses included River's Edge
Flower Farm, the Daffodil Mart, the C.H. Hammer
Nursery, M & G Transportation, and R.L.
Mickelborough and Sons of Mathews. A newcomer
in the business was the Little England Daffodil Farm
in Bena.
In 1960 fields of daffodils could still be viewed from a
boat ride along the North River on the old land
grand plantations of "Auburn", "Green Plains",
"Elmington", and "Toddsbury". In 1962 it was
reported that Gloucester and Mathews Counties were
still the principle centers of daffodil culture in the
country, with more than 24 million daffodils being
shipped out each spring bringing more than
$250,000. In the late afternoon interstate trucks still
rumbled along county roads and picked up cardboard
boxes of flowers to be delivered to airports and cities.
Over the years the business gradually declined with
more and more people turning over the land which
had once been golden with daffodils to more
profitable ventures. In the late 60s and 70s the best
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
Daffodil Society Journal, Mr. Hall stated that "the
business still clings to life …. but an era has ended."
Festivals, Pageants, and Tours
Old tobacco shed at the Daffodil Mart, used for an
exhibition center, office, and bulb storage and sorting.
place for visitors to see daffodils in bloom was the
Daffodil Mart which had established itself as one of
Gloucester's major spring tourist attractions. In 1971
an article in the Washington Post still designated
Gloucester as the "Daffodil Capital of America" and
in 1973 over 10,000 people were expected to visit
the Daffodil Mart.
But, by the early 80s only 150 acres were planted in
daffodils as compared to the 1,000 acres under
cultivation during the peak years. During those years
you could drive almost anywhere through Gloucester
and Mathews and see fields of flowers where now
only abandoned patches remained. Some fields were
still worked and some locals still took a few weeks
each spring to pick for 5 cents a bunch.
In the mid-80s, the Daffodil Mart, run by third
generation grower Brent Heath, was selling nearly
500 varieties of bulbs through mail order catalogs.
Heath still spends most of his time crossbreeding to
produce new varieties.
Today the country's major daffodil region is
Washington State which has a longer, cooler growing
season that helps the flowers thrive. The largest
producers in Gloucester are Brent Heath, with five
acres at the Daffodil Mart, and Granville Hall, who
has six acres he bought from a retired grower after
World War II. In a 1981 article for The American
In 1938 the first daffodil tour was proposed jointly by
the Gloucester Rotary Club and the Gazette-Journal.
The Gloucester board of Supervisors appropriated $50
for expenses of the "First Annual Narcissus Tour"
which was held March 18-April 9, 1938. The county
organized a clean-up week prior to the tour date and
3,000 people took the tour, coming from as far
away as New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Connecticut,
Boston, North Carolina, South Carolina, West
Virginia and Maryland.
By 1939, interest in daffodils was reaching an all-time
high and a festival was added to the tour with a queen
and court. At a festival ball Delta Osborne was
presented as the first daffodil queen. The 1940
Narcissus Tour Committee took the theme "Life in
Holland". A newsreel entitled "The Daffodil Story"
was made in cooperation with the Virginia State
Chamber of Commerce using 30 girls dressed in
Dutch costumes, standing in the local daffodil fields.
Harriet Miller was chosen as queen that year. The
National Geographic magazine also sent
photographers for
photos of the local
daffodil fields for
an article they were
preparing.
By 1941 the advent
of
war
was
commanding
people's attention
and there was less
interest in the
daffodil festivities.
However,
Mary
Tyler
Chadwick
served as queen
with a court made up of representatives from nine
counties. The festival was mentioned in a "Better
Homes and Gardens" article.
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
In 1942 the tour and all festivities were discontinued
due to war conditions. No more annual events were
held until 1958 when the local Lions Club sponsored
a pageant which continued until 1965.
In 1987 a volunteer citizens committee with the
cooperation of the Gloucester Department of Parks
and Recreation organized a spring Daffodil Festival.
They continue to sponsor the annual event which
includes bus tours to Brent and Becky’s Bulbs
(formerly The Daffodil
Mart). The festivities
also include a parade,
fine arts poster, queen,
arts and crafts show,
historical
displays,
performances
and
entertainment. The
annual Daffodil Festival
honors an important
era of Gloucester's
history and its proceeds
go
toward
the
beautification of the
county
through
plantings and other projects. With full community
participation, through schools, civic organizations,
clubs and individuals, the Daffodil Festival has
become Gloucester’s Hometown Festival.
Since 1938 the Garden Club of Gloucester has held an
annual Daffodil Show in which growers compete for
awards. This ADS sponsored show has artistic as well
as horticultural divisions and continues to attract
much attention each spring.
Although this once important industry has all but
disappeared from Gloucester County there still
remain, in the flowers that continue to bloom each
spring, the annual events held, the child selling
bunches of daffodils along a country road, subtle
reminders of this important aspect of our county's
heritage.
Bibliography
American Mercury. March, 1956.
Daily Press. March, 1954.
Daily Press. September, 1954.
Daily Press. April 7, 1968.
Frye, John, "Baltimore's Daffodil Woman" in The Sun
Magazine
Gazette Journal. March 22, 1973.
Gazette Journal. March 10, 1983.
Hall, Grantville, "Commercial Daffodils Along the
Mid-Atlantic Coast" in The Daffodil Journal. 1981.
Heath, Brent and Becky, The Daffodil Mart Scrapbook
Hoyt, Diana Palmer, "Gloucester's Golden Harvest".
Kline, Angela Marie, "The Rise and Fall of the
Daffodil in Gloucester County". May 21,1990
News-Leader. March 25, 1984.
Richmond Times-Dispatch. April 3, 1949.
The Star Magazine. Washington, D.C., April 1, 1962.
Virginia Cavalcade. Spring, 1960.
Washington Post. April 4, 1971.
Washington Post. March 29, 1982.
May 1942 National
Geographic Magazine
includes two articles about
Virginia.
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
The Daffodil Trail
By Edith E. Gray
Would you know the thrill of spring's first waking?
Would you know God's presence-near breathtaking?
Would you? Then listen as I tell.
Down the trail an Indian princess followed:
Near bright rivers, broad and deep and blue:
A trail that white men's roads have long since swallowed:
But still an Indian trail to me-to you.
To the spot where lovely Pocahontas
Saved the life of gallant Captain Smith.
In a land where men's brave deeds confront us,
From which a nation grew and lived forthwith.
In this land-beginning of a nationGod has placed a soil and climate, too,
That exactly suits spring's first creationThe daffodil, a golden dream come true.
Here you'll find wide fields of glowing beauty;
Rows and rows of smiling daffodils.
As you gaze you'll feel that joy's a duty.
Forgotten will be winter's cares and ills.
You will know the thrill of earth's awaking
In a land from which a nation grew.
Old ideals, which maybe you're forsaking
Will be real and dear again to you.
These ideals for which men died are leaven;
Working in our hearts we're nearer God.
You will know His presence: know there's heaven
As the golden flowers sway and nod.
8/12/10
WILD ABOUT DAFFODILS
Images of our modern day
Daffodil Festival.
www.gloucesterva.info