Dash’s Citrus Grove & House

In early Eatonville, many homesites included citrus groves, and one of the largest, Dash’s Citrus Grove, occupied an entire square block bounded by Kennedy Boulevard, West, Clark, and Calhoun Streets. The grove was part of the homestead of the itinerant preacher Reverend John Dash and his wife, who settled in Eatonville about 1920. The property reflected dual residential and commercial use, as the front porch of the Dash home functioned as a general store well into the 1940s. Freezes destroyed nearly all of the mature citrus trees, but new trees germinated from the seeds. The house and yard were also remembered in Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits” as a happy place with a sidewalk edged by quart bottles set neck down in the ground, homey flowers blooming in scattered plantings, and a whitewashed fence and house with a scrubbed white porch and steps.

Eatonville, Florida · United States