Resident managers, including William Padgett in the twentieth century, kept the deBary estate running year-round by supervising contractors, employees, and day laborers and doing carpentry, painting, roofing, ditching, plowing, planting, tending orange groves, and washing clothes. Big freezes in the 1890s ended serious orange growing there, but a smaller workforce continued to tend the remaining citrus trees, handle livestock, maintain the buildings and grounds, plant food plots for quail, and entertain hunters. African Americans from a nearby community labored for the deBarys well into the twentieth century.