The Merrick Packing House Fig

All that is left of the Coral Gables Plantation's packing house is a wooden post inside a fig tree. The historical marker at the corner of Castile Avenue and South Greenway Drive says so in one dry line: "Post in fig tree only evidence remaining." The Daughters of the American Revolution put the marker up. It records the packing house of the plantation established by the Rev. Solomon Greasley Merrick, then hands the rest of the job to the tree. When Coral Gables ran its Tree of the Year contest for its centennial in 2025, residents nominated this fig three times over, as the Merrick fig, the Merrick Shack and the Merrick Post in the Fig. One nomination describes the packing house as survived by a single wooden plank, wedged between the aerial roots of a modest fig tree. Modest is fair. This is not a big tree, and it is on the map for what it is holding. Which fig it is, nobody with authority has said. One nominator calls it a Florida strangler fig; the others say only fig, and so do we. Nobody has dated it either. If you know when it took hold, tell us. It stands on a public street corner in Coral Gables, beside the Granada Golf Course, free to see from the pavement. The marker is on the right as you travel west on Castile Avenue, and the fig is at the marker. Our pin is the marker's position, not a surveyed trunk.