Speaking of all these names, let’s discuss the word “grapefruit.” It’s commonly stated that the word comes from the fact that grapefruits grow in bunches, like grapes. There’s a pretty decent chance that this isn’t true. In 1664, a Dutch physician named Wouter Schouden visited Barbados and described the citrus he sampled there as “tasting like unripe grapes.” In 1814, John Lunan, a British plantation and slave owner from Jamaica, reported that this fruit was named “on account of its resemblance in flavour to the grape.”
If you’re thinking that the grapefruit doesn’t taste anything like grapes, you’re not wrong. It’s also documented that there were no vine grapes in Barbados by 1698. That means, according to one theory, that many of the people on the island would not really have known what grapes tasted like. Their only native grape-like plant is the sea grape, which grows in great numbers all around the Caribbean, but isn’t a grape at all. It’s in the buckwheat family, but does produce clusters of fruit that look an awful lot like grapes but aren’t particularly tasty. In fact, they’re quite sour and a little bitter, not unlike the grapefruit.
This is largely guesswork, almost all of it, because citrus is a delightfully chaotic category of fruit. It hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands, maybe more, separate varieties of citrus in the wild and in cultivation. Some of these, like the grapefruit, clementine, or Meyer lemon, catch on and become popular. But trying to figure out exactly where they came from, especially if they weren’t created recently in a fruit-breeding lab, is incredibly difficult.
A Frenchman named Odet Philippe is generally credited with bringing the grapefruit to the American mainland, in the 1820s. He was the first permanent European settler in Pinellas County, Florida, where modern-day Tampa lies. (It took him several attempts; neither the swamp ecology nor the Native people particularly wanted him there.) Grapefruit was Philippe’s favorite citrus fruit, and he planted huge plantations of it, and gave grafting components to his neighbors so they could grow the fruit themselves. (It is thought that Phillippe was Black, but he also purchased and owned enslaved people.) In 1892, a Mainer named Kimball Chase Atwood, having achieved success in the New York City insurance world, moved to the 265 acres of forest just south of Tampa Bay he’d purchased. Atwood burned the whole thing to the ground and started planting stuff, and soon he dedicated the land to his favorite crop: the grapefruit. The dude planted 16,000 grapefruit trees.