Eola Cherry Company history

“It is a tasteless, indigestible thing, originally to be sure, a fruit of the cherry tree, but toughened and reduced to the semblance of a formless, gummy lump by long imprisonment in a bottle filled with so-called maraschino,” groused a 1911 editorial from The New York Times.

In fact, that in 1912, the Food and Drug Administration felt the need to decree just what could be called a maraschino cherry.

By 1915, cherry consumption in the United States had gone through the roof because of “the fashion of adding preserved cherries, as much as for ornamentation as to give flavor, to many drinks and ices,” wrote U.P. Hedrick in a report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station.

So this was the world that Ernest Wiegand, the man with the pencil-thin mustache, walked into when he arrived at OSU, then known as Oregon Agricultural College, in 1919.

Anne French Dixon When my dad chose to move to Orlando with the Martin Co. in 1957, my parents had a house built in Bel Air Hills.

Noting that over a quarter of a million people flew into Orlando in 1959, a 26% increase from the year prior.

John Ross Great memories from my 2 year stay while working in Orlando 1961-63 By the way, did anyone find my RC boat that disappeared under the fountain in Lake Eola?

Bell Farms Inc was established in 1962 by Ted Bell, and grew into one of the largest cherry farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

President Johnson was the first United States President to spend the night in Orlando while in office, and he stayed at the Cherry Plaza in 1964.

The event with the greatest impact on Orlando was a November 1965 press conference also held in the Egyptian Room at the Cherry Plaza that included Walt Disney, his brother Roy, and the Governor of Florida, Haydon Burns.

In 1966, actor Danny Thomas hosted a reception in the Egyptian Room at the Cherry Plaza.

Here’s one from OSU’s library, called Science, Service and Specialized Agriculture: The Re-Invention of the Maraschino Cherry, submitted in 1998 by one J. Christopher Jolly:

Eola Cherry was sold in 2006, but Craig always maintained the farm.

© Bell Foods International, Inc 2014.

JayLH August 17, 2018 Surprising that although the mascara cherry was mentioned, not a word about Luxardo cherries.

Mimi January 15, 2019 It wasn’t formaldehyde but a word close to it that is slipping my mind.