[From
American Rose Annual, 1922, p. 176:] Heller Brothers, Newcastle, Ind.
[From
Roots of the Rose City, by Darrell Radford, 2014:] The year was 1871. The Henry County Courthouse was two years old. President Ulysses S. Grant and his family stopped in New Castle on their way to Chicago. And in the community down the old National Road, a boy named Herbert Heller was born. These are the roots of “Rose City.” The nickname that stuck with New Castle for the early part of the 20th century – and still seen in some businesses today – can be traced to that inquisitive boy who teamed with an older brother to grow the best roses around. From 1894 to the early 1920s, the Heller Brothers’ business had an annual cut of 1,125,000 flowers. Half a million of those were roses. Soon, the New Castle facilities represented the largest rose-growing operation in the nation.....Herbert and Myer Heller moved from Knightstown to New Castle shortly following the death of their father in 1890. It was about 1894 that they incorporated the South Park Floral Co. The business was “at first for pleasure but the magnificence of the roses grown by them created a demand from this and other cities.” They entered their flowers in big shows at St. Louis, Chicago and Kansas City, among others. “Most of them had heard little of Indiana and none of them had heard of New Castle,” Mrs. Carl Irwin later wrote. “Imagine the pandemonium that broke loose when the roses were put on display and they saw for the first time the flower that was destined to become the synonym for the rose – The American Beauty. “The buds were the size of goose eggs and the petal count higher than any rose before or after that time,” Irwin continued. “When Myer Heller sent his message to New Castle (that their flower had won grand prize) the town went wild. Strangers grabbed each other on the streets and the local people who once thought the greenhouse men an odd breed greeted them as brothers. Someone grabbed a fiddle and they put on a celebration the town was long to remember.”
After they won the Kansas City show, the Heller Brothers had “unbelievable business.” The American Beauty Rose took its place as a symbol of wealth alongside mink and diamonds. They sold for $36 a dozen at Chicago flower sheds. That was promptly doubled for retail. “Lucky indeed was the girl who could stand at her graduation or wedding with the American beauties in her arms,” Mrs. Carl Irwin wrote. The Heller Brothers’ success brought many other florists here. At one time, there were almost 100 greenhouses in New Castle. Names like Weilands and Meeks became well-known locally....But New Castle’s greenhouses certainly were no match for nature’s fury on March 11, 1917, when a tornado roared through town, killing 22, destroying 500 homes and causing $1 million in damage. Some have said the greenhouses were never the same afterwards. The news made headlines as far away as St. Louis, where the Post-Dispatch read “The Rose City Now A City of Ruins.”
There were three other factors that made the roses fade.
— World War I put an end to the export business.
— Natural gas as a source of heat became scarce and the large amount of coal required to make up for it was too costly.
— Competition from other rose growers in the state, notably the Hill Greenhouses in Richmond, made it difficult to dispose of quality flowers that were expensive to raise and market.
