These days, many travelers come to Florida for a relaxing vacation. Some head for theme parks or coastal cities and beaches. Others come to kayak or snorkel in the freshwater springs. Accommodations range from luxury hotels to the Ma and Pa establishments. State parks have rental cabins or offer facilities for glamping or even bare-bones camping.
In the 19th century, Florida was promoted for its salubrious weather. The construction of large hotels and rail lines by the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought an increasing number of tourists, lured by visions of a tropical, exotic paradise (Revels, 45-56).
Leslie Kemp Poole speaks at Florida Tech
Early travelers, who arrived between the 16th and 20th centuries, came for other reasons explained Leslie Kemp Poole, a fourth-generation Floridian and associate professor at Rollins College, at the Florida Tech campus on Nov. 6, 2025.
Poole’s recent book Tracing Florida Journeys—Explorers, Travelers and Landscapes, Then and Now covers 11 different time periods and individuals and focuses on her quest to retrace these journeys.
Poole, who teaches courses in environmental literature and history, said her book is as a “culmination of a decades of my personal interest in Florida History and the Florida Literature.”
In fact, her fascination with these early travelers dates back to vacations with her family. She said she always carried a book by some previous traveler on a family trip—William Bartram or Marjorie Kennan Rawlings in the St. Johns area or John Muir in Cedar Key.
Although the more than 50 audience members were familiar with the some of these early Florida travelers, Poole provided new insight. William Bartram’s travels (1773-1774) on Paynes Prairie with English traders and Seminoles. John Audubon (1831-1832)—his encounter with an alligator and drive to collect and sketch numerous specimens. Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (1867) about a shipwreck. Marjorie Kennan Rawlings came to Cross Creek in 1928 to fine her “soul.”
Two travelers that attracted my attention in this talk were John Muir (1867) and Zora Neale Hurston (1930s). I’ve always associated Muir with the conservation movement in America. But Poole’s quotes and descriptions hinted at so much more.
Here, Oct. 15, 1867, Muir wrote although he sought the floral abundance of the “Florida in dreams . . . .[S]uch was not the gate by which I entered the promised land. Salt marshes, belonging more to the sea than to the land; with groves here and there, green and unflowered, sunk to the shoulders in sedges and rushes.” During his travels to Cedar Key, he contracted malaria but developed his philosophy of a profound respect for the rights of all creatures (Muir).
Hurston’s interviews and chronicles of African-Americans in turpentine camps and for the Florida Writers Project (WPA) provided the basis for many of her stories. Did she find Tea Cake (Their Eyes Were Watching God) in one of those camps?
Although I may not retrace these journeys, the concept piques my interest—the desire to learn more about these travelers, who did not have the ease of travel we experience today and to locate the places they visited.
To provide something of a perspective, I've included a quote from Muir's Thousand Mile Journey in Florida:
"October 16. [1867] Last evening when I was in the trackless woods, the great mysterious night be-coming more mysterious in the thickening darkness, I gave up hope of finding food or a house bed . . . .All manner of night sounds came from strange insects and beasts, one by one, or crowded together. All had a home but. . . with a stone pillow, [I] must have been comparatively happy."
Works Cited
Poole, Leslie Kemp. Tracing Florida Journeys—Explorers, Travelers and Landscapes, Then and Now, 2024.
Muir, John. “Chapter 5 – Through Florida Swamps and Forests.” A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. The John Muir Exhibit. The Sierra Club. https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/a_thousand_mile_walk_to_the_gulf/chapter_5.aspx. Accessed 7 November 2025.
Revels, Tracy J. Sunshine Paradise—A History of Florida Tourism, 2011.
Related Readings
“Let’s Go Glamping.” Florida State Parks. https://www.floridastateparks.org/learn/lets-go-glamping. Accessed 8 November 2025.
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