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TAMPA BAY CHAPTER of the
RARE FRUIT COUNCIL INTERNATIONAL,
Walter Zill spoke at meeting about mangoes and the interesting history
behind the development of the family mango business.
Walter credits his great grandmother Sophie for her part in the mango experience
for the family. She passed away before Walter was born, so all that he knows of her is what
his father has told him, and the information from her autobiography. She came from Germany
in America in 1882, married too hastily, and escaped to Florida in 1901 with her 5 surviving
children. Through the kindness of a Mr. Adolf Hofman and his wife Anna, Sophie was given a
home to rent and land to cultivate. She was later able to purchase the land. She became
involved in mangoes when the USDA made available some high quality varieties. Sophie
purchased some and hired Mr. Hofman, a farmer very skilled in grafting, to work the trees.
One of Sophie’s daughters, Carrie, married William G. Zill, and from their union was
born Lawrence Henry Zill, in 1913, in the city now known as Delray Beach. Lawrence grew
up loving mangoes, and as an observant teenager who was thinking of how to provide income
for the family, developed a better, more efficient way of grafting them. Bottle grafting at that
time was the traditional way of grafting, where a bottle is tied to a tree limb, serving as a vase
to hold water in which a small branch was kept hydrated while the branch was held in place
until it could grow and attach to the limb of the tree being top-worked.
Lawrence thought there could be a way learned to use only a single eye to grow upon a
young seedling thereby making many more plants of a chosen variety than is possible with
using an entire twig. Lawrence now set out to experiment with new grafting methods. Sophie
had a "Julie" tree that fruited and he admitted it was his favorite mango. He knew when to
pick it, and the stage of ripeness when it tasted best to him. A seed of Julie was planted and
grew north of Carrie’s house. It matured bearing fruit abundantly and was so well liked by
the family that they called it the "Sophie Frey" mango to honor the family matriarch.
When Lawrence began experimenting to get a single bud of a mango plant to live and
grow in a seedling he used seeds of the Sophie Frey mango because they were plentiful and
right at hand. At first Lawrence used field grown seedlings. One of those seedlings eventually
grew and fruited, having larger fruit than the Sophie, and apparently was preferred above the
Sophie. That became known as the Carrie mango variety.
Lawrence succeeded after three years of effort to produce budded mango plants. He
also learned that mango plants do not take well to being transplanted from field grown, so the
procedure soon involved growing seedlings in containers, budding them therein, and selling
them. In those years they sold for $1.00 in a #10 metal can.
Hence, the family business was born, and the more efficient way of grafting allowed for
more trees to be produced, and more varieties to be developed.
