Backwoods life, no filter

Florida residents sit with their guests in front of their
homestead's main structure. This photo is from an 
1892 issue of Demorest's Magazine.

By the 1890s, Florida's cities offered growing lists of amenities that eased daily life for residents. Not so for people who lived far from urban centers. Some Florida Crackers deep in the backwoods had primitive living arrangements. 

One of the clearest examples of this, that I've come across, is an 1892 article written by archeologist Clarence Bloomfield Moore for Demorest's Family Magazine. Moore made yearly trips to Florida for sport activities or to conduct antiquities research. Each year he stopped to visit a Cracker friend who lived on the shores of Lake Harney in the east central part of the state. The1892 article is about one of these visits.

You can read the magazine article on the Florida Memory website. My focus in this post is on the living conditions of a family identified only as Captain Mansfield, his "old woman" (no name or relationship provided), a hired worker named Grant and an unnamed young woman with a baby. The young mother was introduced as a relative of the Captain's.

The Mansfield homestead consisted of the following:

• a one-room cabin made of palmetto thatch, with a palmetto lean-to attached to the back;

• a palmetto-roofed barn with a loft and with walls made of animal skins;

• an outdoor, open-air kitchen that had a roof, if you can call it that. You can see what I mean in the photo at the end of this post. 

Moore said the assembled group lived contentedly on the lakeshore in this ramshackle collection of buildings. Mansfield and the older woman slept in the one-room cabin, the younger woman and the baby resided in the lean-to and the hired worker slept in the barn loft. 

If you look at the group photo, everyone does seem somewhat laid-back as they listen to the Captain tell stories of Seminole War days. He was a Civil War veteran as well as a Seminole War veteran. To me, he doesn't look old enough to have fought in any but the third of the Seminole Wars. But looks can deceive. The "old woman" appears quite aged in a close-up photo you'll see if you read the article.

In Moore's story, the Captain and the older woman come across as likeable, talkative and welcoming to their visitors. Moore and/or his traveling companions (not sure who's who among the visitors) seem equally at home in the photo, accepted even by one of the guard dogs who initially greeted the Northerners with bared teeth. The young woman and hired worker don't have voices in the story but are included in the group photo.

Neighbors were nonexistent. Moore says the homestead was the only habitation around the entire lake, a nine-mile body of water with 11 miles of shoreline. The nearest thing to a settlement was a small community named Geneva, three miles away. Even today, Geneva's population is less than 3,000 people.

I can't even begin to understand the work required just to survive -- just to make sure there was enough food, water and shelter to sustain life on the homestead. I can't imagine cooking in what passed for a kitchen. Or sleeping surrounded by palmetto fronds that harbored all kinds of insects. How did the family ride out storms and deal with year-round mosquitos? What happened if they became ill? To say this family lived close to nature is an understatement.

I also want to know more about the relationships among what, at first glance, appears to be a mismatched assortment of people. Ones who looked out for each other in wild surroundings. Who heard bird call in the morning and saw star-studded skies at night. Who shared a hard life with a seeming contentment that escapes so many in our modern age. 

This photo of a Florida homesteader
 in her kitchen is from an 1892 issue
of Demorest's Magazine.

Food, culture contrast in 'Cross Creek Cookery'

Cross Creek Cookery was published 75 years ago.

This year (2017) marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Cross Creek and Cross Creek Cookery, both by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. First editions of both books have a place of honor on my bookshelves.

Rawlings moved to Florida in the 1920s and homesteaded in pioneer fashion on a citrus grove in Cross Creek. Even today, the Creek remains a hamlet. It's a strip of land sandwiched between Lochloosa and Orange lakes, an easy drive from Gainesville or Ocala but a century away in ambience.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Cross Creek was remote. Many local customs and behaviors were country holdovers from the turn of the 20th century and earlier. Rawlings captured the essence and lifestyles of the people, and brought them to life in fiction and nonfiction. Readers met many of the locals in Rawlings' popular memoir, Cross Creek.

Although Rawlings lived her version of a Florida Cracker lifestyle at Cross Creek, she was from a privileged background. She moved seamlessly between her rural haven and the urban Northeast. Nowhere is that contrast more evident than in Cross Creek Cookery. 

The cookbook features a mix of local country cuisine and family recipes from Rawlings' cultured upbringing. The instructions for "Mother's Almond Cake," with its "Almond Paste Filling" and "Boiled Frosting for Almond Cake," require three pages of text. "Cassava Pudding" - a backwoods treat - needs only a paragraph. The recipe was shared with Rawlings by a homesteader in the Ocala National Forest. The woman and her family had settled in the Florida scrub before it became a national forest.

The book's commentary is as revealing as the juxtaposition of recipes. Rawlings was aware. She knew that although she had lived in Cross Creek for years, she never truly could be of Cross Creek. In her preface to the recipe for "Sweet Potato Pone," she tells of the time she invited a local friend to Christmas dinner at Cross Creek. She spent days preparing an elaborate meal.

Afterwards, she told her guest the meal was an example of a typical Yankee Christmas dinner. She asked what his family would eat for a typical Florida Cracker Christmas dinner. Her friend's reply? "Whatever we can git, Ma'am. Whatever we can git." (Page 183)

Be sure you get the chance to spend some time with one or both of these classic books. Happy 75th Anniversary to a piece of Florida's past.

Learn more about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her life and works from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society: https://rawlingssociety.org