Palmetto Leaves

In 1867, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin settled in a small cottage in Mandarin, Florida, overlooking the St. Johns River.  She had promised her Boston publisher another novel  but was so taken with northeast Florida that she produced instead a series of sketches of the land and the people which she submitted in 1872  under the title Palmetto Leaves. Stowe describes life in Florida in the latter half of the 19th century—"a tumble-down, wild, panicky kind of life—this general happy