Francis Xavier Heidrich I, former head of Herman J. Heidrich and Sons, one of the largest packers and shippers of Florida citrus, and patriarch of one of Central Florida’s largest families, died on August 20, 2022. He was 102.
Francis was born on February 22, 1920, in Philadelphia. He was the second of four children of the late Herman Joseph Heidrich II and Sarah Frances (Devlin) Heidrich. At the time of Francis’s birth, his father, Herman, was building up a wholesale fruit and produce shipping business in Philadelphia. By the 1920s, the business was prospering, but when the crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, Herman lost everything. Borrowing $100 from one of his customers to start over, he came to Florida in 1930. Recognizing opportunity in the still largely rural state, he opened a packing and shipping house in Ocoee and an office in Winter Garden. In 1935, he moved his family to Orlando.
When the Heidrichs came to Orlando, at that time a slow-paced citrus and cattle community, Francis was 15. Hailing from a high school of 3,500 students in Philadelphia, he was shocked to discover he would be one of only ten students in the senior class at his new school, St. James Catholic School, in Orlando. Telling the story later in his life, he would say: “I couldn’t understand why my parents would want to move to such a small, backward town.”
The outlook for Francis at St. James Catholic School soon improved, however. There, he met and fell in love with a girl whose family moved from New York City to Orlando in 1936. Her name was Doris Mary Feuerbacher, and they dated steadily through and after high school.
Upon graduating from St. James, Francis joined his father in his packing and shipping business, in which Francis’s two brothers also would work. Named Herman J. Heidrich and Sons, the enterprise eventually acquired thousands of acres of citrus groves in Central Florida. At the close of World War II, the Heidrichs shipped about 250,000 boxes of citrus annually. By 1950, their volume tripled, and over the next five years it doubled again. In 1954, they designed and built – in a record 80 days - the most technologically sophisticated citrus processing plant in Florida, situated on a ten-acre site on North Orange Blossom Trail. Herman J. Heidrich and Sons grew to become the largest packer and shipper of citrus in the state. In 1955, the company’s plant sorted, sized, washed, colored and shipped a record 1.4 million boxes (equivalent to 2.8 million in latter-day quantities because the boxes used later were half the size they were then). The Heidrich’s “Dankee” brand, which bore the name her grandchildren called Francis’s mother, Sarah Frances, was sold up and down the East Coast of the United States under the family’s proprietary citrus label. In the summertime, when Florida citrus was not in season, Herman J. Heidrich and Sons brokered the shipment of peaches from South Carolina and Georgia. Succeeding his father as managing partner of Herman J. Heidrich and Sons, Francis would head the business for the rest of his life.
Francis and Doris were married in 1942. After several years, they built and moved into one of the first homes erected on the Isle of Sicily on Lake Maitland in Winter Park. The home kept having to be expanded over the years, because Francis and Doris had twelve children. But it was an extraordinary place in which to raise them. There, Francis taught his children to ride bikes, swim, water ski, and drive boats. On Sundays, after church, he instituted a family tradition of making homemade ice cream on the terrace in the back yard – taking care to produce it in batches large enough for the whole family and their friends.
Devoted Christians, Francis and Doris were among the earliest members of a new mission church that St. James Catholic Church, in Orlando, founded in Winter Park: St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church. Joining the St. Margaret Mary mission in 1948, the year after it was founded, Francis and Doris and their children attended their first mass in the new setting, when there were only 14 other worshipers in the congregation. Francis was appointed Chairman of the Building Committee, which undertook to erect a new church at the corner of North Park Avenue and West Canton Avenue. He was also elected President of a newly-formed Pension Committee of the Catholic Diocese of Orlando. Francis and Doris sent their children to St. Margaret Mary School and then Bishop Moore High School. Francis would remain a member of the St. Margaret Mary parish for 74 years.
Francis and Doris divided their time between their Isle of Sicily home and a home in South Carolina, where they spent their summers during the peach brokerage season. They were avid travelers, and when Francis obtained a pilot’s license in 1957, they flew with their children in the family’s small plane back and forth from Florida to South Carolina, and also to Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and destinations within the United States.
Francis had an abiding love of his family, coupled with a curiosity about his genealogical origins. In 1948, in his spare time and before the aid of computers, he began researching the Heidrich family’s past. He started by writing letters to a few contacts he was able to obtain overseas. After years of work, he was able to trace his roots back to Anton Heiderich (sic), born in Pferdsdorf, Germany, in 1640. Francis’s research led to trips with Doris to meet relatives in East Germany when it was still a communist country and special permission needed to be obtained to enter it.
Francis and Doris enjoyed 33 blessed years of marriage together until 1975, when Doris’s sudden and unexpected death devastated the family. Francis kept Doris’s spirit and influence alive by taking up the role of both father and mother. Today, 33 grandchildren, 56 great grandchildren, and 7 great-great grandchildren are descended from Francis and Doris.
In 1978, Francis married Rachel Ingram. Merging gracefully into the Heidrich family, Rachel brought insight and a quiet constancy to Francis’s continuing devotion toward his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Helping to raise a third of Francis’s and Doris’s children to adulthood, she proved a blessing as his wife and their stepmother. Rachel helped Francis preserve his extensive collection of family photographs, movies, and other mementos. She also assisted with his research of the family’s genealogy and his writing of an autobiography. Together, they traveled around the U.S., Canada, and Europe to pursue additions to his genealogical records. They were graced with 43 years of happy marriage.
Francis began writing his autobiography in the mid-1980s, at about the same time he purchased his first computer. Titling it Never a Dull Moment, he wrote in it about his early memories of family life in Philadelphia and described pranks he committed while growing up there and in Orlando. Turning to his adulthood, he recounted the births and marriages of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and his life and times with them. Consisting of 132 pages of text and photographs, the autobiography was a labor of love motivated by Francis’s desire to share his past with his family.
As managing partner of Herman J. Heidrich and Sons, Francis served on many citrus and peach industry committees over the years. He also worked closely with most of the other citrus and cattle pioneers that played prominent roles in building up pre-Disney Central Florida, including the Dr. Philips, Bronson, Caruso, Battaglia, Roper, and Hughes families. When successive freezes in the late 1970s and early 1980s decimated the citrus industry in the state’s middle region, the Heidrich family gradually began selling off its land holdings. In 2000, it sold the last of its major tracts, the 2,130-acre Magnolia Creek property, to the Ginn Company, which developed it into Reunion, a resort and golf club.
Francis always stayed in touch with his family. Until the end, he never missed sending birthday greetings by telephone and email to all his 108 descendants. During the birthday telephone calls to his children, he would tell the story of their birth, never failing to mention what he had been doing at the moment he learned of their imminent arrival. Although they had heard the story before, they never failed to be delighted by the retelling and came to expect it.
Francis was a caring and generous man, always ready to help family, friends, charities, sometimes even strangers. One of his often-repeated sayings was “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Francis was predeceased by his mother and father, his siblings, Herman Joseph III, Helen Jeanette, and Paul Daniel, his wife, Doris Mary, his daughter, Mary Lynn Harper, his sons, Herman Joseph IV, and David George, his grandsons, N. Donald Diebel, Jr., Joseph M. Harper, Jr., and Thomas Luke Heidrich, his great-grandsons, Austin William Stone, and Sean Patrick Hempsted. He is survived by his wife, Rachel, his children, Anne Diebel-Lane, Francis X. Heidrich II, Patricia Anne Heidrich (Bruce Brofman), Doris Mary Hardrick (Allen), Mary Elizabeth Rich (Jonathan), Lucia Anne Burbridge (Michael), Michael Francis Heidrich, Christopher Brian Heidrich, and Mary Frances Heidrich.
A visitation for Francis will be held Sunday, August 28, 2022 from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Baldwin-Fairchild Altamonte, 994 E Altamonte Dr, Altamonte Springs, Florida 32701. A memorial mass will take place on Monday, August 29, 2022 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church, 526 N. Park Avenue, Winter Park, FL 32789 with the Reverend Father Patrick O’Neill officiating.
The family requests that in lieu of flowers, contributions in Francis’s memory may be made to St. Margaret Mary Church, 526 N. Park Avenue, Winter Park, FL 32789. After the Memorial Mass, the burial will take place at Greenwood Cemetery, 1603 Greenwood St., Orlando, FL 32801. Immediately following the burial, a reception for family and friends will be held, location to be announced.
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