Joel “Wardy” Smith Honored as 2024-2025 Great Brooksvillian

According to Kerry (K.O.) Smith, his grandfather, “Wardy” Smith, never wanted accolades while he was alive. Therefore, it’s fitting that fifty-four years after his death, the city of Brooksville bestowed this honor on Smith. Wardy joins the ranks of such illustrious citizens as Alfred A. McKethan, Virginia M. Jackson, and last year’s recipient, Barbara Manuel−who have all been named Great Brooksvillians because of their significant contributions to our community.

At a presentation ceremony on October 24th, Brooksville Vice Mayor Christa Tanner gave some background information about Wardy. He wasn’t born to wealth. In fact, raised on a farm, Smith was one of ten children and had to quit school at the age of nine to help support the family when his father died. He worked various jobs including farming, carpentry, and packing vegetables and citrus fruit.

Eventually, Smith got a job at Bell Fruit company. The owner must have seen Wardy’s potential because Mr. Bell sent him to business school. After finishing school at age 23, he spent a year as the secretary and manager of Cocoa Citrus Growers Association on the east coast of Florida.

Afterwards, Smith moved back to Brooksville and acquired his own citrus grove and ran his own packing house.
He supported local businesses. When the citrus growers’ packing house burned down he bought all the lumber to rebuild it from Gene Snow, a local lumber dealer, instead of getting it from Tampa. “It was during a slack time in business,” Snow had commented, “and he kept me alive.”

K.O. spent a lot of time with his grandfather. “Working with him was a challenge,” K.O. says wryly, “because when he let you out of the car to chase the cows out of the woods, he’d be talking to you about something else at the same time, slow down and never stop. You learned how to get out of that Chevy on the run!”

Kerry explained another trait of, not just his grandfather, but pretty much the whole family. “My dad and granddad were great talkers and the only way I could get a word in is that we developed three-way conversations.”

Perhaps one Wardy’s greatest accomplishments was promoting citrus to northerners in the 1920s. He did this by calling restaurants in New York City and getting them to order his products. He utilized refrigerated railroad cars to transport the oranges and grapefruit. His business grew exponentially after that and he encouraged other local growers to do the same.

A few years later he found out about a new species of tangerines that had been developed by a botanist named Charles Murcott Smith (no relation). He liked how it tasted so he bought thousands of bud woods and was able to propagate them. He gave away many of these bud woods to other citrus growers. This species of tangerine is now known as the Murcott and is the most widely grown kind in Florida.

Although, he attained very little formal education, his success in business allowed him to send all three of his children to the University of Florida. He bought a lot of used cars back in the day and even purchased or built several gas stations in Brooksville.

Kerry relates a humorous incident. “He bought an Austin American [a small British-manufactured car]. He arranged for a professional photographer from Bushnell to come over and take a photograph of it in front of the courthouse. My grandfather walked over to a nearby store and started talking to some people. Meanwhile, several high school students literally picked up the car and carried it into the courthouse. When my grandfather got back he was pretty upset and used some pretty colorful language. The students asked him if he wanted them to carry it out of the courthouse and he said, ‘No. Just hold the doors open.’ and he drove it down the steps of the courthouse. He just laughed the incident off.”

Another story that Kerry tells is about his grandfather being promoted to supervisor at the rock mine he worked at.
“It wasn’t because of what I knew,” Wardy had quipped. “It was because I was the only one who could stand at the edge of the mine and when I’d catch the men goofing off or taking a nap, I was the only one with a loud enough voice to cuss them out and tell them to get back to work.”

Wardy was a man ahead of his time in many ways. For example, his wife was a suffragette and he supported the women’s suffrage movement. He supervised the construction of various buildings that were part of the WPA (the Works Progress Administration−one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs to lift the country out of the Depression). He grew vegetables, giving most of them away to needy people during this bleak period and allowed anyone access to ponds he owned so they could fish.

At one time, Smith’s ranch was comprised of 2,000 acres. People used to say that he owned the half of the county that McKethan didn’t own. He took part in humanitarian deeds, including creation of a baseball diamond at the corner of his pasture for African-American members of the community to use. This was before schools and athletic teams were integrated. Other contributions included purchasing a stained glass window for the First United Methodist Church and donating land on Wiscon Road for the Humane Society.

Wardy was adventurous. He would often fly in private planes owned by local businessmen to such far-off places as Montana and Nova Scotia. It was due to Wardy’s persistence and generosity that Brooksville became known as the Home of the Tangerine. We now have the Tangerine Drop every New Year’s Eve and up until a few decades ago, there was the Tangerine Hotel and other businesses named for the tiny fruit.

Currently more than 212,000 people reside in Hernando County and it’s difficult to believe that back in the 1950s, the population was a mere 6,700. It was a close-knit community in which everyone knew everyone, many of the families were related and people helped each other.

Unusual too, for that time, was that Wardy did a lot to help the African American people. Members of the Timmons and Mobley families worked for him and Kerry worked for them.

“They were family, too” remarks Kerry. “My grandfather was a good example of how to help anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they had money or didn’t have money. He never knew a stranger.”

He concluded, “My grandfather was great, but what helped make him great was all the other great people we had in the county.”