Harriet Beecher Stowe, although best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin about the cruelty of slavery, also wrote about Florida . In the 1860s, the Stowe's purchased property in Mandarin, Florida , on the St. Johns River (near Jacksonville ). She wrote, "At last we came to the plantation house, a rambling, one-story cottage, with a veranda twelve feet wide in front. It was situated in a yard enclosed by a picket fence, under a tuft of magnificent Spanish oaks." They felt Florida did not have as many racial divisions as the rest of the South following the Civil War, and Harriet helped establish schools for African American children in Florida.