Plant City Award Winners

At the hub of eastern Hillsborough County, Plant City lies 10 miles west of Lakeland and 24 miles east of the protected waters of Tampa Bay. Entering Plant City from Interstate 4 or from U.S. Highway 92, streets canopied with ancient oaks embrace and welcome you to a city that wears its past proudly.

Strangers are greeted as friends as they browse through quaint shops in our Historic Downtown district, where you can readily see that the old is not thrown away but celebrated. An old building that once housed a drug store and hospital is beautifully restored and becomes the charming Camellia Rose Tea Room; an old railroad station turns to exhibiting and teaching Plant City history. But this is no small town trying to revive its past. Plant City is about today and tomorrow!

The area surrounding Plant City is a patchwork quilt of pasturelands and citrus groves, strawberry fields and nursery farms. This agricultural fabric is laced together by an infrastructure of highways and railroads that move the fruits of labor to markets all over the world. Plant City's high standard of living comes from this land. Mining and agriculture and the businesses that support these industries remain the foothold of the local economy, after 128 years.

But the strawberry is the crop for which Plant City is most widely known. The majority of the winter strawberries in the U.S. are grown on 8,300 acres of farmland surrounding Plant City. This area, rich in minerals and fertile soil, has a history of prosperity and promise that precedes the Civil War era.