The History of the Sunshine State in Literature

Florida’s multicultural history sets it apart from the rest of the South. Our rich, tapestried past—including Spanish conquistadores; a colony of French Huguenots, however short-lived; the British; and an influx of Creek Indians—likely contributed to our choices. Depending on whom you ask, we backed the wrong side of the American Revolution, remaining loyal to the British, while in the Civil War, or the War Between the States, again depending on whom you ask, split from the Union to provide salt and cattle to the Confederacy while dispatching troops of farm boys to die in far-off battlefields.

Florida having been spared some of the ravages of war experienced by other Southern states, Reconstruction brought both opportunists and plain folks seeking a new life where it was warm and where, according to pitchmen like poet Sidney Lanier—paid to write of how fertile Florida farmland would be once it was drained— with a little effort, you could hit pay dirt. Lanier was not the only literary figure of his day to turn Florida huckster. The most prominent promoter was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the most famous woman in America at the time.

Twenty years earlier, after contributing articles to Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular magazine, and prompted by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an antislavery novel of astonishing, unprecedented success in American publishing history. The book galvanized antislavery sentiment and helped touch off the Civil War. First published as part of a 50-part newspaper series, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on newspaper accounts and anecdotal information supplied to Stowe by escaped slaves, put a human face on the institution of slavery. The success of the book, which was outsold only by the Bible, allegedly prompted President Abraham Lincoln to call Stowe “the little woman who started this big war.”

In 1872, the year Whistler painted his mother, despite the hordes of mosquitoes that settled on one’s eyelids, the snakes, the occasional alligator clambering up the riverbanks, and the threat of yellow fever, Stowe had fallen in love with Florida. It happened when she traveled to Orange Park just south of Jacksonville on the St. Johns River to visit her son Frederick, who was trying unsuccessfully to operate an orange grove.

At the time, Florida was the least populous state east of the Mississippi, with only 250,000 inhabitants scattered through the Panhandle and along the coasts. When she and Frederick rowed across the river to Mandarin to get their mail, the New England–born and bred Stowe decided that Mandarin would make an ideal winter home. It was the house, however that closed the deal: a cottage for sale on a 12-foot bluff with a 30-acre orange grove behind and a wide porch in front, one end wrapped around a giant oak tree and facing the river.

Lincoln had supposedly referred to Stowe as a “little woman,” and that she was. It was how she described herself: “I am a little bit of a woman as thin and as dry as a pinch of snuff.” Although there was anti-Yankee sentiment among the local settlers, Stowe reports that it was never directed at her. Tiny and sharp-featured, with ringlets of wavy hair woven through with orange blossoms, she was known to stop suddenly in the midst of a conversation to stare out the window.

At first it was to her biblical scholar and ardent abolitionist husband, Calvin, that Stowe was to write of Florida’s flowers and sunshine. Soon she began to write a series of newspaper articles praising the state, and thus began her new role as a major booster of Florida tourism. Traveling about the state by steamer and mule cart while corseted and wearing high-button shoes, Stowe wrote vivid portraits of Florida’s people, flora, fauna, and climate.

The articles were later assembled into a book titled Palmetto Leaves (my favorite chapter is “Magnolia”), the first promotional writing to reach the country at large. Stowe wrote of mockingbirds, live oaks, fertile lands, and lazy rivers, of steamboat fares and schedules and points of interest, and of just being: “to be able to sit with the window open, to hear birds every day, to pick flowers from hedges all winter long.”

Addressing the complaints of tourists dissatisfied that Florida was not always the paradise it was cracked up to be, she wrote, “The problem is that people expect Florida to be a paradise all the time.” Stowe compared the state to two sides of an embroidery, exquisitely wrought on one side and rough on the other side with cross-hatching and knots. “If I had my way wholly,” she wrote, “I would never come north at all.”

Stowe became as influential a supporter of Florida as she had been an antagonist of slavery. Tourists flocked over the grounds of her home, and steamboat captains saluted her dwelling with a blast of their whistles. In 1916, a commemorative stained glass window commissioned to Tiffany was installed in the local Mandarin church, where it remained until 1964, when Hurricane Dora caused a hickory tree to slam against the window, shattering into shards the scene of the view of the St. Johns River from Stowe’s front porch.

In 1879, a writer calling her-self Sylvia Sunshine wrote a newspaper account of an Episcopal church service in Mandarin. “Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe is here today. The service was opened by a very long prayer from Dr. Stowe, after which he preached a sermon on godliness. Mrs. Harriet had confidence in the ability of her husband and went to sleep.”

This Stowe satirist was actually somewhat of a woman of mystery using the whimsical pen name Sylvia Sunshine. Her given name was Abbie Brooks, and she was a native of Pennsylvania. Reportedly, she had a child whom she gave up for adoption—a possible reason, given the strict mores of the day, that she chose relative anonymity.

Brooks was less promoter than reporter, and her flippant pen name belies the quality of her work. A few years after the publication of Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves, Brooks published Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes, a travelogue of Georgia and Cuba with a graphic ramble over Florida in the 1870s. Like Stowe, she made the journey by steamer and mule cart, providing an engaging account of the early settlement of Florida, its natural beauty, and cultural landscape, ranging from appraisal to critical satire, with an overlay of Victorian lyricism. Covering a wider territory in Florida, Brooks visited Key West and Tampa, describing the west coast settlement with “deep, sandy sidewalks and dilapidated fences, discouraged from sheer weariness of trying to be a town.”

Women seldom traveled alone in those days, particularly to undeveloped regions like Florida. Like Stowe, Brooks also cruised the St. Johns River, although she spent more time on the Ocklawaha, the St. Johns’ largest tributary, where thickets of sweet bay and sweet gum lined the river’s banks, the haunt of the “cracker,” whom she describes as having “a hearty welcome for the stranger” and whose fare, while not gourmet, was bountiful, guests’ plates piled high with chicken, sweet potatoes, and corn bread “washed down with strong coffee.” Brooks also classified three types of tourists: the defiant, the enthusiast, and the indifferent, who wondered why he left home in the first place.

After her move to St. Augustine, Brooks became enamored of Florida’s Spanish history, which until then had been shrouded in obscurity. She steamed across the Atlantic to Seville, where she took on the laborious task of translating documents dating from 1500 to 1810 in longhand with the help of a Spanish archivist who translated from Old Spanish “at a fearful price.”

This project led to five volumes of translated documents that were sold to the Library of Congress in 1901 and a book titled The Unwritten History of Old St. Augustine. Her portrait hangs in the city’s Casa Monica Hotel (now Casa Monica Resort and Spa), a structure that once belonged to Henry Flagler. Brooks, witness to a post-bellum South whose narratives identified Florida as a land of escape, rehabilitation, and opportunity, was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Augustine’s Evergreen Cemetery.