The Dying Poet Who Wrote Florida’s First Tourism Pitch

In 1875 a Baltimore flutist dying of tuberculosis took a job writing a guidebook to Florida. He included a chapter addressed directly to other consumptives, telling them what the climate might do for their lungs. He was dead six years later at 39.

How He Got There

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842. He served in the Confederate army and piloted a blockade runner called the Lucy, which was captured in November 1864. He contracted tuberculosis in a military prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, and spent the remaining seventeen years of his life sick and short of money, working as a hotel clerk, a teacher, a lawyer, and finally as first flutist for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore. The Florida book was paid work. He later wrote a travelogue about India without ever setting foot there.

The Book

The full title runs: Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History, with an Account of Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, and Aiken; a Chapter for Consumptives; Various Papers on Fruit-Culture; and a Complete Hand-Book and Guide. J.B. Lippincott published it in Philadelphia. It is part travelogue, part medical advice, and part real estate brochure. Lanier wrote up the St. Johns River, the springs, and the rough frontier towns with the ear of a working musician, and the book helped fix Florida in the northern imagination as a place people went to get well.

What to Know

Lanier died on September 7, 1881, near Lynn, North Carolina, still chasing a climate that might cure him. Georgia named a lake after him. Florida got the better book: the University of Central Florida’s STARS digital library hosts a free, complete scan of the 1875 edition, and it is worth ten minutes just to see how the state was being sold 150 years ago.