"Come to My Sunland"
Letters
of Julia Daniels Moseley from the Florida Frontier, 1882-1886
Edited by Julia
Winifred Moseley and Betty Powers Crislip
Like so many midwesterners since, Julia Daniels and Charles Scott
Moseley moved to Florida in the 1880s seeking a warmer climate.
This collection of Julia’s letters--mainly to her husband,
who made frequent business trips north, and to her close friend
Eliza Slade--reveals the struggle of a cultured, urban woman
adjusting to the hardship and isolation of life in pioneer
Florida.
And then coming to love it. Tramping through the unsullied land
surrounding the Limona community near Tampa, where they settled,
she gloried in her "neglected corner in the Garden of
Eden," where she "could look up fifty feet and see air
plants growing on the branches of great oaks and hundreds of
ferns nodding . . . in the sunlight and gray moss moving through
the trees like mist." "Think of me gazing up among
crane’s nests with redbirds in my own oaks," she wrote.
"Even in the nighttime, a mocking bird often sings to me of
all the beautiful things I love."
Julia (herself a published writer) selected these unedited
letters and copied them for her family into a thick leather book.
Like characters in a novel, the friends and relatives she
describes crackle with personality: a flamboyant Russian
proclaims his version of communism, a New England spinster
counters with Utopian visions, and a university professor
retreats from the ivory tower to agricultural experimentation.
Readers observe Julia’s flair for making daily life cheerful
and they meet the couple’s two adored sons and Scott’s
children by an earlier marriage, as well as Cracker settlers,
cattle runners, and assorted seekers of health or wealth.
An artist, Julia created a distinctive home designed and
decorated in the manner of the pre-Raphaelites. Her palmetto
fiber wall covering was exhibited at the Chicago World’s
Fair in 1893 and survives today. The Florida house, named The
Nest, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Accompanied
by 71 photographs of Julia’s home and family, these letters
transcend the life of one woman to capture the experience and
spirit of 19th-century Florida.
Julia Winifred Moseley, the granddaughter of
Julia Daniels Moseley, lives in Brandon, Florida.
Betty Powers Crislip lives in Tampa. Both are
officers of Timberly Trust, Inc., the organization established to
preserve the Moseley family home and its environs. They are
active in other local civic groups as well as in preservation.
The Florida History and Culture Series
1998. 272 pp. 6 X 9.
71 b&w photos, notes, bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1605-3Cloth, $29.95
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"Reveals the struggles of a cultured, urban woman adjusting to the isolation of pioneer life, but there's a joie de vivre that surges through Come to My Sunland . . . . It is in this writing that Moseley shines the most, for she shows her strength, her artistic sensibilities and her passion for the wilds of Florida. The 71 photographs of her home and family included in the book, which feature the flowers and environs of Florida, underscore this fervant love." --
St. Petersburg Times
"Julia's letters bring to life the Cracker settlers, cattle runners, and assorted seekers of health and wealth that she encountered in daily life.
This collection is an entertaining and enlightening look at life in frontier Florida at the end of the nineteenth century." --
Georgia Historical Quarterly
"Her letters offer exceptionally vivid descriptions of the surrounding community's natural endowments, especially its palms, pines, oaks, and flowers, but also its springs, rivers, and lakes. . . . A delightful excursion into a lost world."--
Florida Historical Quarterly
"I read ‘Come to My Sunland’ with growing surprise, page by page, at the stunning Florida legacy left us in these letters by Julia from Illinois. A frontierswoman of culture and refinement, she made Florida not only a home, but a canvas on which she painted the old scrub lands east of Tampa in the 1880s, with their wild fields and hammock oases, their passion flowers and butterflies, mockingbirds and larks, lake vistas and flaming sunsets. Come, reader, into that seemingly distant world where a prototypical Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings reminds us yet again how much we Floridians have sadly lost: reverence for the land."-- Michael Gannon, author of Florida: A Short History