November 1998
"Come to
My Sunland"
Letters of Julia Daniels Moseley from the Florida Frontier, 1882-1886
edited by Julia Winifred Moseley and Betty Powers Crislip
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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." -- St. Petersburg Times
"These letters are those of a gifted woman who captured a bygone era with the gentle strokes of a landscape artist. Page after page the reader will be afresh rewarded with her acute observations of home and nature." -- Wauchula Herald-Advocate
"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
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.
272 pp. 6 X 9.
71 b&w photos, notes, bibliography, index
ISBN 0-8130-1605-3 Cloth, $29.95
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