Treat for dad all year: ‘A Land Remembered’
Rick Smith remembers that during the day, his dad worked at Brevard Community College as director of public relations. But at night, sitting at the family’s kitchen table, Patrick Smith worked at writing novels.
Living on the modern Space Coast, Smith created a saga of old Florida, “A Land Remembered,” that thousands of readers have embraced for its appreciation of the state’s frontier heritage and precarious environment.
The book is a great gift idea for dads, on Father’s Day and all year long — and for anyone who enjoys a good read.
When Patrick Smith died in 2014 at 86, the fine writer Jeff Klinkenberg noted in the Tampa Bay Times that other Florida authors might be better known than Smith, but it was his “A Land Remembered” that repeatedly topped polls of favorite Florida books.
No romanticized saga
“The one thing I did not want to do with this novel was make it a romanticized story of Florida pioneer life,” Smith once said about “A Land Remembered.”
In a saga that spans a century from 1858 to 1968, members of Smith’s fictional MacIvey family face hurricanes, citrus freezes, alligators, rattlesnakes, ravaging bands of Confederate deserters, and a plague of mosquitoes so thick it can suffocate a herd of cattle.
To prepare for writing the novel, Smith spent a year reading books about Florida’s history and “took pounds and pounds of notes.” He also traveled the state, sitting on porches in small towns while folks told family stories over fresh-cooked collard greens and peach cobbler.
During these visits, Smith collected stories not only of hardship and struggle but of beauty and wonder — of moon vines so thick you would walk over treetops on them, of a custardapple forest and of Pay-Hay-Okee, the River of Grass.
At the heart of the stories was the land itself. At the novel’s close, the last of the MacIveys, Sol, “is no less concerned with combat and survival than his father and grandfather,” Malcolm Jones wrote in a New York Times review in 1985.
But unlike his forebears, the last MacIvey has used his skills in a lifetime of land grabbing that has turned a wild land of wolves and panthers into something Smith saw as far more scary: a wilderness of parking lots, strip malls, high-rise condos, dried-up swamps and polluted waters.
A whole new audience
Late in Patrick Smith’s life, he saw “A Land Remembered” reach a whole new audience through a two-volume student edition. Young readers wrote him by the hundreds — over time, by the thousands. Sometimes they sent pictures of themselves dressed as characters in the book. The MacIveys had become real to them.
Often, his young correspondents would ask him why a favorite character had to die (and, spoiler alert, plenty of them do). “A lot of kids read a book, and they don’t want anybody to die,” he said. “But that’s not the way life is.”
Patrick Smith was a great speaker and storyteller as well as writer, and the video titled “Patrick Smith’s Florida: A Sense of Place” is a good way to get to know him or renew your acquaintance. It’s available at patricksmithonline.com, a website created by Patrick’s son, Rick.
Pioneer Village grows
The Osceola County Historical Society’s Pioneer Village at Shingle Creek is just the kind of place to explore the world of “A Land Remembered.”
It’s open every day (except major holidays) at 2491 Babb Road in Kissimmee. Self-guided tours are available during regular hours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Recently, the Pioneer Village celebrated the opening of a replica church, the last of three 1800s replica buildings that were constructed and furnished with support from a state grant. (The others are a train depot and a schoolhouse.) The site also contains historic structures that once stood in different areas of Osceola County and have been carefully relocated and preserved at the Pioneer Village. For more information, visit osceolahistory.org. Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.