FAMILIES
31
ter’s brother, who lived on Okeechobee Road, and to Joseph
Archambeault, a fellow grower.
During his travels, Archambeault, a French Canadian
emigree, had gotten some navel orange grafts from South
America, according to George.
“Dad got some of the grafts from his trees,” he says. “We
planted seven acres of navels. Those (Archambeault’s) were
the first navels in St. Lucie County.”
Through the years, George F. Guettler purchased groves off
Trowbridge Road and a 20-acre grove on Kirby Loop Road
that had belonged to his brother, Leo, and others. “After
Daddy got it,” George says, “we planted about a fourth with
tangerine trees, the rest was already valencias.”
Talking about their father’s mechanical aptitude, George
remembers when he bought a Model T car and took it apart.
He bought a kit of iron wheels and made a tractor from the
car and the kit. This was the first tractor their father had. It
ran on kerosene and had pockets on the fenders to hold tools.
“Norbert and I would ride in the pockets as Daddy worked
in the groves,” George said.
At one point, their father went to buy a used tractor from
his sister’s husband, Phillip Hoeffner, but the tractor had no
reverse gear. “Mr. Hoeffner said: Good farmers don’t need to
back up,” George says, with a chuckle.
The sons remembered their father buying 500 bales of
tobacco to use for fertilizer. It came to Fort Pierce in a railcar
and they say their Dad and others unloaded the tobacco,
which was stored at the Backus boat yard by South Bridge.
Eventually the tobacco was chopped up and used as fertilizer,
spreading it behind the tractor using an apparatus created
with the propeller from an airplane. They say their Dad >>
Of Fort Pierce
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Monsignor Michael Beerhalter, multi-decade pastor of St. Anastasia Catholic
Church, had a great friendship with parishioners George F. and Christine
Guettler. The couple helped bring his vision of a large Catholic enclave
in western Fort Pierce to fruition by selling a large parcel of land along
Delaware Avenue to the diocese and then donating the payments made on
the land to their church.
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