Contemporary historians have provided us with new
insights into our state's unique heritage.
The
University Press of Florida is continuing that scholarship with its History and
Culture Series, of which "Come to My Sunland": Letters of Julia Daniels
Moseley from the Florida Frontier, 1882-1886, is the fourth
volume.
Charles Scott Moseley, an executive with a watch company in
Elgin, Illinois, in 1882 relocates his family to the restorative environment of
the firm's colony, Limona, near Tampa, Florida.
What happens when Julia
Daniels Moseley, his wife, a cultivated young lady, moves to that frontier
village?
In her letters, written primarily to her Elgin friend, Eliza
Slade, and husband, who is frequently away on business, reveal, she creates an
oasis of beauty and culture.
Her prose captures her passion for life and
a deep love of family, literature, and nature. She exults: "The very air
caresses me as if it loved me. The birds sing to me as if they were confiding
their joys to me. The sky looks down on me as if I had guessed the secret of its
loveliness...I can never go North to live..."
Indeed, Julia is blessed
with an artistic ability to observe and create beauty so that it permeates her
being. She is as one with Keats, "A thing of beauty is a joy
forever."
But Julia's quest for an Eden idyll is unattainable. Her
husband's frequent absences and everyday housewifely tasks leads her to
despondency, and she is subject to frequent illnesses. In two emigres she finds
solace. Frederic Weightnovel, a Russian Bohemian doctor, faithfully ministers to
her, while Clementine Averill, an elderly New Hampshire Utopian, provides
companionship.
Of her Cracker neighbors she critiques: "Women with their
youth starved out of them, children who looked as if they never had any
childhood. So many of the people here look like the dogs--lean, old, starved,
sly. Such human beings do not create a smile. They take all the mirth out of
life and leave only pity and horror."
Ironically, the family's first
home, which burned in 1885, was the Crackers' former New Hope church
building.
In conclusion, 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.
Come to my Sunland, edited by Julia Winifred Moseley and
Betty Powers Crisp, contains 256 pages, with 71 photographs, notes,
bibliography, and index. The cover price is $29.95.
It will be available
in bookstores in September, 1998 or can be ordered from University Press of
Florida, 15 NW 15th Street, Gainesville, FL 32611-2079,
1-800-226-3822.
This book review was originally published in The
Herald-Advocate (Wauchula, Fla.) of August 6, 1998.
The
University Press of Florida is continuing that scholarship with its History and
Culture Series, of which "Come to My Sunland": Letters of Julia Daniels
Moseley from the Florida Frontier, 1882-1886, is the fourth
volume.