Harriet Beecher Stowe and Florida Tourism

Abstract

Before Cinderella’s Castle, there was Mrs. Stowe’s Cottage. A hundred years before Disney World, Duval County boasted one of nineteenth-century Florida’s premier tourist attractions, conveniently located on a bluff above the St. Johns River. In the 1870s and 1880s, punters paid 75 cents to board the Mary Draper or some other steamer out of Jacksonville, ‘guaranteeing’ them a good gander at her orange groves and a glimpse of America’s most famous writer in her chair under the great oak tree which had been built into their veranda, reading or composing or perhaps watching the great blue herons wading in the shallows. Less orderly visitors — often New England fans of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — would invade her gardens and groves and, as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son tells it, ‘pick flowers, peer into the house through the windows and doors, and act with that disregard of all the proprieties of life which characterises ill-bred people when on a journey’.¹