Cyrus Condit's 150-year-old novel tells of Florida before the Civil War

A story about a story about early Florida, before the Civil War, from the Orlando Sentinel's Joyce Wallace Dickinson. The novel was uncovered in the archives of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. While other tales had been written before Condit's, theirs were written as stories of an "idealized paradise" according to one expert, and not by someone who'd actually seen an alligator in the wild (excerpts of article below):

Poor Cyrus P. Condit. He was only 31 when he died in early 1861.The New York Times briefly noted his passing and his funeral in Newark, N.J. He left behind a wife and two young daughters.

And judging from the pages of the Times several decades later, you might also want to offer posthumous condolences to the late Frederick W. Dau of Westport, Conn., whose book Florida Old and New was published in 1934. The Times reviewer was not kind to Dau, whom he claimed had no literary style and "was devoid of any sense of what might be called the rhythm of history."

Ouch. Poor Dau.

But now, thanks to Rollins College professors Maurice O'Sullivan and Wenxian Zhang, these two chroniclers of Florida – Condit and Dau – may be raising a toast in the great hereafter.

While the title leaves a lot to be desired, Condit's book will finally get an audience. 

'Strong on action'

So, Cyrus Condit is an author, 150 years after his death. His Trip to Florida for Health and Sport, edited by O'Sullivan and Zhang, has been published by the Florida Historical Society Press. In May, the book won the society's coveted Patrick Smith Award, given annually to a book of fiction on a Florida history topic.

Smith himself declared the book "strong on action and description," providing a rare look at life in 1850s Florida.

Such a look is rare, indeed. In 1855, Orlando was a crossroads named Jernigan, where the first frame house wouldn't be built until 1857. But at Enterprise in Volusia County, steamboat captain Jacob Brock completed a hotel in 1854 that could house more than 50, most of them Northerners such as Condit, who arrived by steamer on the St. Johns River.

A few earlier novels had been written with Florida as their setting, O'Sullivan says, but they were imaginary tales of pirates or stories of doomed romance in an idealized paradise, written by people who had never seen a mosquito – or an alligator.

Condit's tale may very well be the first novel dealing with life in Florida in the years before the Civil War, the Alamo, and the Gold Rush – the years, O'Sullivan says, when Florida was America's frontier, the place the young nation looked to for its myths of untamed wilderness.

Read the rest of the article: Long-lost novel brings wild, wooly Florida to life

- Jonny O