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Home sweet Coconut Grove home
Marjory Stoneman Douglas' cottage should not be moved

OPINION & ANALYSIS

Home sweet Coconut Grove home

Marjory Stoneman Douglas' cottage should not be moved

Jack E. Davis | Special to the Sentinel

Posted January 7, 2007

Since 1999 I have been working on a biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas. For nearly as long, I've been following the controversy over whether her house should be removed from its Coconut Grove location so that it may become a museum elsewhere.

Much has been said about the little cottage itself, how Douglas loved it and how it provided an inspirational refuge during her long and productive life as a writer and environmental activist.

Less has been said about her attachment to the postage-stamp piece of land upon which the house sits. The land was her own little corner in the subtropics, and it and the house together were, for 72 years, part of her being.

Years before she built the house (1926), when she was still living with her father and stepmother in Miami, she had her eye on Coconut Grove. In the 1910s, she and friends would ride bikes out the dusty-white limestone road southeast to the hammock-shaded village, the area's oldest established community. She felt a kinship with the Grove's residents -- intellectuals, artists and naturalists peacefully ensconced in their green Bohemia -- and so when finances allowed, she bought a lot and hired an architect.

She found the physical setting of the Grove, which she called "enchanted country," as equally attractive as the people. Even "as the drama and tramplings of a thousand real-estate men" went on beyond the Grove's borders, it managed to remain, she observed, "a bit of old south Florida, as lovely, as remote, as anything in the South Sea Isles."

She loved her little spot in it for the songs of the "magnolia warblers, red-starts and black-throated blue," and "the delightful smells of blooming things, the honey-and-arnica of sapodillas, the sweet of lime and grapefruit, the spice of the long pink lilies of the coral bells."

The red-brick patio outside the back French doors became her favorite spot to sit with a lapboard and write her stories and books and to watch, smell, and listen to the mass of living things.

On the advice of her friend Mabel White Dorn, she planted in her yard a black olive tree, a mahogany tree, an oleander bush and an assortment of other flora. The two combined their talents and coauthored a South Florida gardening guide. Published in 1928, this book, not River of Grass, was Douglas' first.

Thirty-nine years later, she published her eighth book, a history of Florida. Its subtitle, The Long Frontier, referred to both the physical length of Florida's peninsula and to the duration of the state's frontier period. Immediately upon that period's end, an avalanche of development and change fell on the state. Florida's "unending frontier," she wrote hopefully in the book's last lines, was the challenge of man to "set his powers of creation against his impulses of destruction."

These words contain wisdom that might be heeded by those who are deciding the fate of Douglas's home. As a Floridian, she knew, and lamented, that change more often than not trumped preservation. As a historian, she understood that a place that had no sense of its history had no sense of its self, that it grew impersonal and culturally barren -- for how can a culture burrow roots and thrive when there is little permanence in the physical setting. And before virtually anyone else, she knew that old Florida was rapidly becoming a rare commodity, a kind of commodity that tends to increase not decrease surrounding property values.

Douglas worked selflessly during the last decades of her life to keep intact not only the Everglades but also the natural aesthetic that has long attracted people to Florida and the Grove. If we ourselves are selfless, we'll keep her house and land intact. It's the least we owe to one who gave us so much.

Jack E. Davis is associate professor of history at the University of Florida, where he specializes in environmental, Southern, and Florida history. His latest book (edited with Ray Arsenault) is "Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida," and he is currently completing a book entitled "A Life with the Everglades: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Evolution of American Environmentalism." He wrote this commentary for the Orlando Sentinel.

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