Clara Barton's 1.5 Million Strawberry Plants

After the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the Red Cross ran relief on the Texas Gulf Coast. Then Clara Barton, 78 and president of the Red Cross, asked a different question about the farms on the mainland: what would help the growers get back on their feet? The answer was strawberry plants, and the Red Cross ordered 1.5 million of them.

Fields With Not a Plant Left

Barton wrote the story down herself in her 1904 account of the Red Cross. The storm had hit the strawberry-growing section of southern Texas, and the damage reached as far as forty miles inland across flat country.

Her account says that for miles not a plant was left, and the growers had no means to buy new ones. She describes the farmers walking their desolated fields and wringing their hands.

Relief for the mainland was run from Houston, after Red Cross supplies were moved there from Galveston.

The Two-Week Deadline

Red Cross workers made what Barton called an intelligent inquiry into what the farmers needed. The growers had done the math. If new plants went into the ground within two weeks, they could still raise a half crop that year.

A Mr. Ward placed the orders so the plants would arrive inside that window. They came from nurseries in North Carolina, Illinois, Arkansas and Louisiana, about 1.5 million in all.

Roughly 38,000 plants were damaged on the way, and the shippers sent replacements.

A Third of a Crop

The plants went in on time. Barton's account estimates that about a third of a crop was harvested that same year, from fields that had been bare weeks earlier.

The plants spread, and by the 1930s train cars of berries were leaving Pasadena, Texas, every day. The town earned the nickname Strawberry Capital of the South.

Still Celebrated in Pasadena

Pasadena still holds its Strawberry Festival every May, a tradition that began in 1974 and draws more than 50,000 people a year. Local retellings credit Barton with bringing the strawberry to the town, and in October 2026 the Red Cross and the city unveiled a statue of her in Southmore Park.