Photo courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
By Brenda Eubanks Burnette
William John Howey (1876–1938) was born in Odin, Illinois, and spent his early adulthood in insurance, real estate development and automobile manufacturing before turning to agriculture. After ventures in Oklahoma and Mexico, he arrived in Florida in the early 1910s and began selling citrus groves near what are now Dundee, Lake Hamilton and Star Lake. By 1914, Howey began purchasing vast tracts of land in Lake County for $5–$10 per acre, clearing and planting them with citrus. He sold them as developed groves for $800–$2,000 per acre. By 1920, he controlled nearly 60,000 acres in Lake County, making him one of the largest citrus developers in the state.
As Babe Prevatt recalled in a 1977 interview, Howey acquired thousands of acres from the Arbogast Land Company at astonishingly low prices and often didn’t pay for the land until after he sold and planted groves for northern investors. According to Prevatt, Howey risked almost none of his own money. Instead, he built a finely tuned sales machine that began in northern offices, especially in Chicago, where he had once lived and worked.
Wikipedia notes: “If the buyer purchased a maintenance contract, Howey guaranteed the investment plus interest within certain time constraints. In 1917, he opened the Bougainvillea Hotel to house potential investors, and in 1924 he replaced it with the Hotel Floridan on Little Lake Harris.”
Prevatt recounted picking and packing fruit from one of Howey’s smaller groves that happened to hit the market at exactly the right moment, bringing an unusually high return of $4 to $5 per box. Howey turned that into a powerful marketing tool, reproducing the check and sales statements in brochures, billboards and salesrooms. Buyers — unaware of how exceptional those prices were — assumed such returns were typical. They weren’t. But the numbers were real, and they were persuasive!
Howey’s grove‑sales model — pairing land purchases with service contracts that promised planting, harvesting and marketing — eventually drew the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. What began as a clever business arrangement became the center of a landmark legal battle after his death.
The resulting Supreme Court case, SEC v. W.J. Howey Co. (1946), created the “Howey Test,” a four‑part standard still used today to determine what counts as a security. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Howey’s contracts were investment contracts — and therefore securities — because buyers were investing money in a common enterprise with the expectation of profits derived from the efforts of others. So, a pioneering citrus developer’s business model in Lake County still shapes the regulation of everything from real‑estate schemes to crowdfunding platforms to cryptocurrency. It’s a legal legacy no one could have anticipated.
Photo courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
Howey founded the town of Howey-in-the-Hills in 1925 and served as mayor of his so-called “Florida Alps” for a decade, building his home there in 1927. He built Florida’s first citrus juice plant in 1921, selling canned juice under the Lifeguard brand. According to Wikipedia, his plant was also the first to bottle citrus juice in the state, pioneering pasteurization and large-scale vacuum storage. This contributed to the development of canned, bottled and frozen concentrated juice.
The plant evolved into the Vaughn-Griffin Packing Company, then Silver Springs Citrus Cooperative. Today, it is part of Silver Springs Citrus, owned by Toyota Tsusho America. Howey’s home has been restored and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Howey was a director of the Florida Citrus Exchange, a member of the State Chamber of Commerce and the first to export fruit to England. His empire barely survived the collapse of the Florida land boom in 1926, the stock market crash of 1929, the Mediterranean fruit fly infestation and the late 1920s hurricanes.
In 1928 and 1932, he ran twice for governor. Although he was unsuccessful, his obituary in The Tampa Tribune noted that “he received more votes than any other Republican ever polled in a statewide election.” He died of a heart attack in 1938, but his vision and legacy remain —showcasing the enduring power of citrus to shape Florida’s identity.
Brenda Eubanks Burnette is the former executive director of the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame and is currently president of the board of Vero Heritage, Inc., which operates The Heritage Center and Indian River Citrus Museum in Vero Beach, Florida.