Ivey House connects to local citrus boom
If your commute includes Orange Blossom Trail between Vine Street and Donegan Avenue, you may have noticed an old, ramshackle-looking home on the east side of the road at 2450 Old Dixie Highway.
Depending on who you ask and whose information you read, it’s called the Colonial Estate or the Tucker/Ivey House, and It’s been there for over a century. It looks like it, too, as all the firstfloor windows of the two-story home are boarded up. But, of late, the overgrowth around it was cut down, enough to see the home — and the construction going on around it.
That house connects Kissimmee to a time over 120 years ago when it was the hub of the citrus industry. Even as recently as the 1950s, OBT was a dirt road dotted with orange groves and trees, and a fruit packing house was built on the northwest corner of what are now Vine and Main Streets, as Old Dixie Highway was the main north-south road residents used to get to Orlando.
But, connecting that to today’s fast-forward growth in Osceola County, County site development plans and reviews show up to 160 condominiums will be built on the property around the Ivey House, while the house will be renovated and may be used as a community center or clubhouse for the project.
The house was built in 1915, and its significance in the local fabric makes it one of, if not the only, residence in Kissimmee to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 13,721-square foot house has four bedrooms, six bathrooms and a masonry and brick fireplace, per the county’s Property Appraiser.
County history records show it was built by (or for) J. Wade Tucker, a lumber executive from Georgia. (Community members who were friends or acquaintances of the family, who asked not to be named for this story, said the home contained elaborate wood features.) The original 11-acre estate also had a nine-hole golf course on what is now OBT. In the 1930s, Hilda and Lester Ivey, the latter born in the Shingle Creek area in 1897, purchased the house.
In 1928 they established Osceola Fruit Distributors and built the packing house at Vine and Main. Later, their only son Clarence “Jerry” and wife Esther “Sis” Ivey moved into the home. In the mid-1970s, Jerry took over the citrus business and changed the name to Ivey Groves. According to Osceola History, he expanded it to include a juice concentrate plant. A feed mill was also added to process juice byproducts into cow feed. Jerry encouraged his parents to produce a new product—chilled juice in fiber cartons. Marketed under the King Sun and Kiss-Me-Sweet brands, the chilled juice was distributed nationwide and in Canada, Florida’s first and largest processors of the product.
In 1949, at the height of the season, 325 workers were employed. The plant had a capacity of 4,000 cases of canned citrus a day totaling about 100,000 cans with the operation entirely automatic from the time the citrus entered the building until the can had been sealed, sterilized and labeled. Three major fires between 1953 and 1964 made it necessary to rebuild after each fire. Osceola Fruit Distributors was the largest employer in Osceola County for more than 40 years. Following his mother’s death in 1975, Jerry dissolved the company, closed the plant and sold the property. Many locals still recall the smell of citrus being processed by the plant as they drove through Kissimmee.
By 1980, Ivey had moved his family into Colonial Estate. Until his death in 2002, Ivey managed about 600 acres of citrus groves in Orange, Osceola and Polk counties. Sis died in 2016.
Late in 2020, Ivey heirs Cynthia Luers and Sheryl Owen sold the estate, valued at just over $1 million, for $4.3 million to Hebden Bridge LLC, which is listed as a construction contractor out of Aventura, Florida, a suburb north of Miami. Industry notes show that Ivey Reserve Park has an estimated $48 million value to Hebden Bridge.
As for the house, its historic place means it can’t be torn down, and its condition prohibits trying to move it from its foundation. County officials said they’ve met twice with the contractors that are doing the renovations to discuss fees and timing. They currently have an issued roof permit, as they wanted to make the roof repairs first and mitigate any water intrusion before they continue with the renovation.
A retention pond is being built on the property’s west side, to set the historic home back from OBT and housing built on the south (Ridgewood Avenue) and east (Old DIxie) side. Renderings show a parcel on the northwest (OBT) side for potential commercial development, which the land is being graded for.
