A SEASON OF CELEBRATION
CELEBRATION
89
ANTHONY INSWASTY
Maddie and Mollie McCain join their younger cousins, Sara White,
Rebekah White and Elizabeth White, on the steps of the Hallstrom House.
dropped out of school and went to work on the family farm.
He learned how to grow vegetables and flowers at a young
age, Smith said.
After immigrating to the United States, he worked in
Chicago and St. Paul, but then, a few years into the 20th
century, he was drawn to Florida by the lure of opportunity.
Henry Flagler had extended the Florida East Coast Railway
down the peninsula, which enabled growers to ship produce
to northern markets faster than by steamboat. In 1904,
Hallstrom bought land in the Viking settlement near Indrio
Road in St. Lucie County for a pineapple plantation. When
his wife, Emely, died a few years later, he sold the land and
moved north to the Oslo community of Norwegian settlers
in what is now Indian River County. There, in 1908, he
planted 40 acres of pineapples on the sandy Florida ridge
100 yards west of the railroad tracks. He later planted citrus,
and he built the farmhouse, using bricks from Georgia and
the help of local craftsmen, many of whom were, like him,
Scandinavian immigrants. The house was completed in 1918.
Hallstrom, a past president of the Indian River Producers
Association of Vero Beach and a director of the St. Lucie
County Bank in Fort Pierce, lived in the house with his
daughter, Ruth, until his death in 1966 at the age of 96. Ruth
Hallstrom, who taught at a one-room school on Orchid Island
for one year and later managed her father’s citrus business
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