6. Descriptions of the Collections


Over the course of the phase 2 project, the University of California-Berkeley, in cooperation with other
libraries in the state, will preserve and improve access to an additional 1,666 titles in 1,842 volumes
important to the study of agriculture and rural life in California and the West. These volumes were
selected for preservation from a bibliography of 7,366 volumes identified during the 1996/97 phase 1
project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The phase 1 project employed a four-
person scholarly review to rank the titles according to their priority as research resources for humanities
studies. Details of California's phase 2 project staffing and costs are found in Section 5.3 of the
proposal's Plan of Work.


6.4 FLORIDA


The unique significance of Florida's agricultural history and past rural life is rooted in the peninsula's
distinctive geography, its subtropical crops and the conjoined histories of its varied peoples. Floridians,
from the pre-contact indigenous peoples, through the Spanish, the British, the crackers, planters, slaves,
Seminoles, and Yankees, have wrestled with the often bewildering Florida environment. Like rural folk
and agriculturists everywhere, they were often hobbled by blind prejudice, benighted traditions, and false
prophets, yet unlike the peoples of more familiar places, they were challenged by a subtropical, year-long
agricultural environment that seemed to promise all yet delivered little. From these circumstances arose
an extraordinary epoch of agricultural experimentation that continues to the present day and is
documented in the collections of the state's principal land grant institution, the University of Florida.

While a major portion of the literature is located at the University of Florida, other important collections
of materials are found at Florida A&M University (a historically black land grant university), the other
Florida universities, and the Florida State Library. The University of Florida has been acquiring
agricultural monographs and serials since the 1880s and has been a regional depository for federal
publications, as well as a depository for state publications. In addition to the general collection, important
titles are found in the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, the Rare Books Collection, and the
University Archives.

Florida's first farmers were the Tumucuans, the Appalachees and other indigenous peoples who
significantly modified the natural landscape through the use of fire. Thus the first Europeans found a
relatively open forest criss-crossed with footpaths and broken by fields of native plantings of maize and
tuberous crops. With the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in 1565, European livestock, crops and
agricultural methods began their slow but inexorable spread across the face of Florida. Oranges were
among the first fruits to be planted along with other, ultimately less successful, Mediterranean crops.
Spanish agriculture was severely limited, however, as the Crown had no wish to reward colonials for doing
that which could lead to self sufficiency. Only hardy cattle were allowed to thrive in the interior scrub
and marshlands.

A twenty-year period of British control (1763-1783) saw the establishment of more extensive plantations
of rice, long-staple (sea island) cotton, indigo, and oranges along the St. Johns River and the tidewater
bays and estuaries of the upper east coast. With the return of the Spanish, agriculture was once again
stymied by the centralized bureaucracy of a flagging empire along with the economic realities of Spanish
mercantilism. In 1819 Florida was acquired by the United States, but even under U.S. control the
population of Florida grew slowly. Native Americans from the Southeast region, along with escaped
slaves, were now amalgamated into a new group, the Seminoles, who fought a series of debilitating wars
against the white settlers and the United States Army. Because of this and the wilderness nature of the
Everglades, the southern two-thirds of the Florida peninsula was a sparsely settled area at the advent of
statehood in 1845.