Firehouse Museum Mamey

Florida's largest mammee apple tree ends up, every year, as ice cream. The Key West Firehouse Museum holds an annual mamey ice cream social, made with fruit from the tree in its yard, and in June 2024 the tree was still bearing. It is the state champion of its species on the Florida Forest Service register. In 2018 the county forester measured it at 328 centimetres round at chest height and 14.9 metres tall, with a crown about 17 by 12 metres. He also wrote down its condition: fair, mature and declining. The 2024 fruit is the most recent word on its health. Nobody recorded when it went in. Firehouse No. 3 was built in 1908, and the museum's account is that the tree followed a few years later. Volunteers threw it a 105th birthday party in 2019, a date worked back from the roughly 21 years a mamey needs before it fruits; a 2024 newspaper caption made it 115. Both are the museum's guess, so call it somewhere between 100 and 120. One naming trap: "mamey" is also the common name of Pouteria sapota, a different species altogether. The register is specific that this one is Mammea americana. The tree stands on city land between the museum and the building next door. The museum is free, with a suggested donation, and opens Wednesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00. Whether you can see the crown from the street without going in, we have not been able to confirm.