The downtown Plant City address of 208 S. Collins Street once housed the headquarters of a major player in Florida agriculture.
Henry Kilgore and his wife, Flossie, founded the Kilgore Seed Company in the early 1900s. Prior to their marriage, Flossie worked in her uncle’s seed business. So, after 1905 when the couple moved from Bartow to Plant City, Flossie applied seed knowledge to the business and Henry supplied a talent to sell and long hours of work. Initially, he walked from farm to farm selling seeds, but soon dramatically upgraded transportation to a horse and buggy so he could reach more people. Their business sprouted quickly. The company opened its stores across Florida and grew so much that it soon needed its own building to house operations. Masons and carpenters completed the Kilgore Seed Company building in 1916. It contained offices, warehouse space, and a rear loading dock.
The company bloomed to 14 store locations and began publishing its own mail-order catalog. The distribution peaked at 40,000 copies per year. The 1922 catalog listed dozens of vegetable seeds with hundreds of variations of squash, turnips, cucumbers, tomatoes, and corn. Products like Wizard Concentrated Manure (Weedless!), small farm implements, and chicken-raising products rounded out the catalog’s offerings.
In the early days of Kilgore, it began to crossbreed to develop its own vegetable strains. The same 1922 catalog also included Kilgore’s Stringless Valentine Beans, Kilgore’s Extra Selected Globe Tomatoes, and Kilgore’s Florida Flint white corn.
The Kilgore Seed Company made Henry so widely known that the Southern Seed Convention elected him president for the 1926-1927 term. Then Florida voters elected him to the 1933 Florida House of Representatives.
By 1959 the Kilgore Seed Company building had added a state-of-the-art laboratory to develop hybrid vegetables. However, in 1965 Kilgore moved to a new headquarters on Highway 39. In 1968, Upjohn, a Michigan-based company bought Kilgore, and in 1970 changed the name to Asgrow Florida Company.
The Kilgore Seed Company building is listed on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Register of Historic Places. The building has undergone facelifts but remains nearly unaltered from the day it was finished. The business currently residing in the building is The Mercantile, which offers antique and vintage shopping.