Overview

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the US, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida's Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region's Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities. Kristalyn Shefveland describes how the Indian River Farms Company and other boosters painted the region as a wild frontier, conveniently accessible by train via Henry Flagler's East Coast Railway. Shefveland provides an overview of local A�s and Seminole histories that were rewritten by salespeople, illustrates how agricultural companies used Native peoples as motifs on their fruit products, and includes never-before-published letters between Vero Beach entrepreneur Waldo Sexton and writer Zora Neale Hurston that highlight Sexton's interest in story-spinning and sales. Selling Vero Beach unpacks real and fabricated pasts, showing how the settler memory of Florida distorted or erased the fascinating actual history of the region. With a wide variety of stories invented to lure investors and tourists, many of which circulate to this day, Vero Beach is an intriguing example of why and how certain pasts were concocted to sell Florida land and products.

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Kristalyn Marie Shefveland is associate professor of American history at the University of Southern Indiana. She is the author of Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646-1722. A multi-award-winning narrator, Katie Koster got her BA in theater and math from Boston College. After college, she returned to her native New York, where she developed her theatrical career and dry sense of humor by starring in The Sedarises' The Book of Liz and doing improv comedy with puppets. She lends her humor, intellect, and character variety to her narration, along with her empathy and acclaimed emotional range.

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