- Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Letter to Mary Estlin,” December 21, 1868. All letters cited in this paper were collected from the Kirkham Papers in the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Archives in Hartford, Connecticut; “Southern Christmas and New Year,” Christian Union 13, no. 3, January 3, 1876, 144. Stowe used this weekly column as a platform to advertise the South in descriptions of the attractive fruit, flowers, people, and social life in Mandarin, Florida; “Personal,” Christian Recorder, December 21, 1882.
- “Palmetto Leaves from Florida, Swamps and Orange-Trees,” Christian Union, March 25, 1872, 316; “Letter to Susan Lee Warner,” February 16, 1880. This was a productive period in painting for Stowe, who went on to write, “I have painted more than usual this winter—That thing comes over me in spells and this winter is one of them. The last thing was a section of an orange bough with a bright red bird sitting very pert and trim upon it enjoying the prospect-They wouldn’t let me put a red bird in my large panel and so I made one on purpose for him.”; “Letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes,” January 1, 1879; “Palmetto Leaves from Florida, No. 2” Christian Union, January 24, 1872, 156.
- See: Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Raking Up the Fire,” House and Home Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 104–5. Originally quoted in Robin Veder’s “Mother-Love for Plant-Children: Sentimental Pastoralism and Nineteenth-Century Parlour Gardening,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 26 (2007): 27; Catherine Ester Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869): 295. Harriet Beecher Stowe encouraged women to parent fruits and plants like children. Stowe and her sister Catherine Beecher specifically encouraged mothers to cultivate fruits with their daughters, for they viewed it as a great domestic exercise that promotes health, neatness, sharing, and nurturing skills. William Saunders, author of Both Sides of the Grape Question, also invited young women to experiment with fruit cultivation, saying “friends of the vine everywhere, try it. Encourage your little girls to try it . . . Your children . . . will take delight in watching the development of the young plant trained by their young hands. I know it.” These authors contributed to a wide canon of domestic and horticultural manuals that described fruit cultivation as a training ground for young girls to practice motherly love. The likening of growing children to growing fruit is fitting since fruit cultivation was more broadly thought to help raise and cultivate a refined society. Comparisons between fruit and children highlight the social agency that fruit carried in late-nineteenth century America. Catherine Ester Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869): 294–5; William Saunders, Both Sides of the Grape Question (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott and Co., 1860): 72; The full quote reads: “I always did admire the gorgeous and solemn mysteries of [Rembrandt’s] coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne, he chooses simple and every-day objects, and so arranges light and shadow as to give them a somber richness and mysterious gloom.” It seems only natural that Stowe found artistic inspiration in Dutch art, a culture known for excelling in paintings of fruits and flowers. Stowe might have learned about Rembrandt and Dutch artist from the reproduction of their paintings in books and engravings that circulated North America. Dutch art also existed in the famous collections of Henry Clay Frick, Charles Wilson Peale, and Nicholas Longworth in New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. These collections, in combination with the immigration of artists from northern Europe, fostered an appreciation for art from this region. It is also known that Stowe travelled to Germany and enjoyed the galleries in Dusseldorf and Cologne. In Abbie H. Fairfield, Flowers and Fruit from the Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 166. For more information on the history of Dutch art in America, consult Nancy T. Minty’s “Great Expectations, the Golden Age Redeems the Gilded Era,” in Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1600–2009 (Boston: Brill, 2008).
- John McPhee, Oranges (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 96.
- “Letter to Roxana Ward Foote,” January 3, 1828; “Letter to Bucklin Claflin,” March 6, 1882. The full quote reads: “I am painting a great panel of orange trees blossoms and fruit which I am going to sell for the benefit of our Church here—that is about all I have done in that line.” It is likely that she was referring to the Episcopal Church of Our Savior, a church she helped found in 1880 with her husband Calvin Stowe in Mandarin, Florida.
- Semi-Tropical: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Southern Agriculture, Horticulture, Immigration, Literature, Science, Art and Home Interests 2 (October 1, 1875): 19–20. The Semi-Tropical was a small-scale agricultural journal published in Jacksonville, Florida, and edited by Harrison Reed. This excerpt in Semi-Tropical paraphrased Ledyard Bill in his book A Winter in Florida or Observations on the Soil, Climate and Products of Our Semi-Tropical State with Sketches of the Principal Towns and Cities of Eastern Florida (New York: Wood and Holbrook, 1870), 19–20. The full quote reads: “The South is full a hundred years behind the North in many things; and this is more true when speaking of Florida than of the other southern states. It is a sort of a wild pasture-ground parceled out into great estates, several thousand acres each, under the old Spanish grants. Not a tenth of the land is yet cleared, while the remaining portion is but a tangle of swamp and pine-forest, interspersed with lakes and rivers.” Quotes of this nature were commonplace, describing Florida as a backwards state comprised of swamp and wilderness; Proceedings of the Florida Fruit-Growers’ Association and its Annual Meeting Held in Jacksonville (Jacksonville: Office of the Florida Agriculturist, 1875), 28; Semi-Tropical 2, no. 2 (February 1876): 9–10. This article in the Semi-Tropical also paraphrases Ledyard Bill in his book A Winter in Florida, 9–10. Bill warns southerners that they will need to switch from a plantation system to a broader farming system. He advocates for the diversification of agriculture in the South, carrying with it a broader diversification and inclusivity in the South. The full quote reads: [Cotton] “was profitable to the large planter; and its tendencies were a concentration of wealth and the elevation of the few: whereas a diversified industry among a people not only makes them more independent, but greater enlightenment follows . . . the whole Southern country to-day needs, more than all things else, a broader culture both in the field and in the school. This accomplished together with an entire revolution of her old-time intolerance and exclusiveness, and her road to independence and importance will be found both broad and easy.” This quote reveals how some believed that changes in agriculture could translate to larger social changes in the South.
- Letter to Elizaebth Georgiana Campbell, May 28, 1877.
