Among the tourists who descended on Green Cove Springs during the annual winter migrations of the late 1800s was a unique category - older women traveling in small groups or packs as their behavior sometimes suggested. They adopted demanding and difficult attitudes. They criticized everything and everyone in an effort to appear blessed with superior knowledge and discriminating taste.

They were masters of the pursed lip sneer and prone to trail a gloved finger over any surface - prospecting for dust. Like battleships on full power they plowed ever forward held rigidly erect by heavily engineered corsets and dragged twelve yards of fabric over rear-mounted metal frame bustles like a wake.

Late in the season, in March of 1885, a trio of these ladies boarded the train in Philadelphia for a three-week stay in Green Cove Springs. They fully expected to be disappointed in the Florida experience and were determined to reinforce their conviction that the southern yokels would fail to achieve their high sophisticated standards.

The train was too slow, the service poor and pine trees in Georgia were boring. Jacksonville didn’t impress them because the St. James Hotel was full and management placed them in a boarding house with dirty beds. They did admire the sour orange trees, dripping with fruit planted on every street.

On the boat trip south on the St. Johns River, they were heard to marvel at the giant live oak trees draping into the water but found the moss dreary. They saw Mrs. Stowe’s house and were suitably impressed but after all she was “their kind of people.”

Their final destination was the grand Magnolia Springs Hotel just north of Green Cove Springs and at last the ladies could find no fault – except the price of $4.50 per day or $28 a week.

Nestled in the posh surroundings with the latest innovations of elevator, intercoms to summon liveried servants and both gas and electric lighting. The ladies became less disapproving. When they took tea in the lavishly decorated lounge amidst oriental rugs, European landscape paintings, and crystal chandeliers, both their postures and attitudes made a subtle shift.

They ceased peering down their narrow noses in a pose full of disdain. They couldn’t miss the enthusiasm of fellow guests – diplomats, congressmen and an Italian opera star seemingly charmed by the Florida scenery, customs and people.

They bought woven palmetto hats, shipped oranges to everyone they knew, and doffed stockings and laced ankle boots to dangle their feet in the sulfur spring. One supposed grand dame even stood in line in a shop in Green Cove to purchase a live baby alligator for her grandchildren. They loosened those corsets to collect moss and orange blossoms and wore broaches of lassoed chameleons on their ample bosoms.

In fact, they had a wonderful time and at the end of the holiday boarded the train in Jacksonville headed north. The chameleons and the baby alligator escaped somewhere around Waycross but, as the story goes, those corsets stayed permanently loose. Shocking.