Echoes from a Distant Frontier :The Brown Sisters' Correspondence from Antebellum Florida

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Moving with two aunts and a brother following the deaths of their parents, the Brown sisters settled near the village of Mandarin on the east bank of the St. Johns River, just south of present-day Jacksonville. These two articulate and literate women, both aspiring authors, wrote of their experiences and observations to family members—most important their brother Mannevillette Brown, an artist who lived in various European locales and eventually in Utica, New York.