Parts of Palmetto Leaves appeared in a newspaper published by Stowe's brother, as a series of letters and essays about life in northeast Florida.

She considered it her duty to help improve the lives of newly emancipated blacks and detailed her efforts to establish a school and church in Mandarin toward these ends.

Stowe described the charm of the region and its generally moderate climate but warned readers of "excessive" heat in the summer months and occasional cold snaps in winter.

By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) moved to Florida in 1867, she was already internationally famous for authoring Uncle Tom's Cabin, published as a serial between 1851 and 1852.

[5] For $10,000 ($153,500 in 2009) she purchased a cotton plantation near Orange Park, south of Jacksonville, named Laurel Grove, that was originally established by slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley in 1803 and managed in part by his African wife, Anna Madgigine Jai, until 1811.

As an extension of her abolitionist ideals, she wrote to her brother Charles Beecher, however, about her potential role in the endeavor: My plan ... is not in any sense a mere worldly enterprise.

Stowe's transformation in Florida was rooted in her identification and familiarity with Puritan New England: industry and thrift in a climate where cold sharpened one's senses and values.

"[1] She wrote about the land and climate intoxicating her and pondered the effect it might have had on literature when she posed an idea to her publisher: "I hate to leave my calm isle of Patmos—where the world is not and I have such quiet long hours for writing.

[21] Stowe remained active, attending speaking engagements, writing, traveling frequently and publishing several novels while she was wintering in Mandarin.

Some essays are directed to describing the best sights in the area, such as "Flowery January in Florida", "Picnicking up Julington", "The Grand Tour up River", and "St. Augustine".

Her observations of the state and characteristics of emancipated slaves are mentioned intermittently in letters and essays, but the final two chapters, "Old Cudjo and The Angel" and "Laborers of The South", are dedicated solely to this topic.

Stowe addressed this in the foreword to Sunny Memoirs of Foreign Lands, writing: If the criticism be made that every thing is given couleur de rose, the answer is, Why not?

The object of publishing these letters is, therefore, to give to those who are true-hearted and honest the same agreeable picture of life and manners which met the writer's own eyes.

She calls it "the fairest, the noblest, the most generous, it is the most surprising and abundant of all trees which the Lord God caused to grow eastward in Eden", and compares it to her task of educating emancipated slaves.

[1] Stowe purchased a lot in 1869 to build a church for her neighbors that would double as a school to educate children, freed slaves, and anyone eager to learn.

Though she encountered considerable frustration in dealing with the bureaucracy of the Freedmen's Bureau, construction was finished within a year and a teacher was in place, procured from Brooklyn, New York.

While her neighbors helped to raise funds to rebuild the church, Stowe and the small community handed spellers to local blacks who were eager to learn.

She details watching sugarcane pressed into sugar crystals, going visiting with her elderly and obstinate mule named Fly, and discovering the myriad things to find in the woods and what can be made of them.

[36] Those who wish to live in Florida, Stowe warns, must also get to know its deficiencies: occasional freezing weather in winter, unsculptable lawns, insects and snakes, and people who disagree as they do everywhere else.

[37] Malaria is a fact of life, and Stowe cautions Northerners who may be lured to the region by tales of the mild climate to understand that temperature extremes are common, taking particular effort to address consumptives, or those afflicted with tuberculosis.

[44] Stowe's final chapter is dedicated to defending the notion that blacks should be employed to help build the state of Florida to transform it from a wilderness into a civilization.

[26] Two years after its initial publication, a writer working for Harper's magazine noted that Stowe was "besieged by hundreds of visitors, who do not seem to understand that she is not an exhibition".

By far, the majority were men who concentrated on hunting prospects, but the women who wrote about the region often used an adolescent narrator who was usually male as a device to describe their encounters with the novelty of what they saw.

She herself would doubtless have viewed it as a fitting Christian act to help restore a prostrate, defeated brotherland to its feet; Florida's first promoter was merely a Good Samaritan.

The Cambridge Introduction to Literature series on Stowe addresses it briefly, however, noting that the mixed essay and letter format make it "uneven in quality and unstable in stance".

[23] Susan Eacker agrees, writing that Stowe's views were representative of the majority of white Americans' ideas of where blacks should be in the social scheme of the New South.

They were met by his cabinet and staff on the steps of the state capitol building—which was festooned with greenery and a large welcome sign for the occasion—and they gave Stowe a round of loud and exuberant cheers.

In 1916, an ornate stained glass window constructed by Louis Comfort Tiffany was installed in the Church of Our Saviour, depicting a large oak tree overlooking the river.

[51] The stained glass window became a tourist attraction and the last memorial to Stowe in Florida; in later decades some of the parishioners and clergy had doubts about its "churchliness" as it was a rare depiction in an Anglican church not referencing a Biblical theme.

Artist Christopher Still created an oil on linen painting named The Okeehumkee on the Oklawaha River that hangs in the Florida House of Representatives.