Historic Homes of Florida's First Coast is an essential book for anyone interested in visiting the wide variety of fascinating early residential structures which are open to the public in the North Florida area.  With five geographic sections containing short chapters about each of the chronologically listed homes, this book provides readers with an easy to use guide for planning entertaining and educational day trips throughout the region.  Among the homes featured are some of the nation's oldest Spanish Colonial structures located in St. Augustine, the Kingsley Plantation house on Jacksonville's Fort George Island, and simple "Cracker" style houses located throughout the area.  Collectively, these homes span a time period of more than 250 years.  Former residents of the homes include exiled European royalty, writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, musician Frederick Delius and a number of lesser known but equally important early settlers of the North Florida area. In addition to the informative and absorbing text, Historic Homes of Florida's First Coast includes ninety images; thirty vintage photographs accompanied by sixty original photographs of both the exteriors and the rarely photographed interiors of these important structures.  Through both words and images, award winning photographic artist and author Mary Atwood brings to life the rich histories of these homes, sharing stories of the courage displayed by those who made significant contributions to the area now known as Florida's First Coast. "In Historic Homes of the First Coast authors Mary Atwood and William Weeks not only document historically significant homes in our area; they also offer intimate images into the lives of those who occupied these dwellings. Atwood's photographs show both exteriors and interiors of the structures, but more importantly, the text records details of everyday living as well as events in the surrounding community." - Marie Vernon, St. Augustine Record, Sunday, March 1, 2015 "Atwood continually cites "courage," as the underlying theme to both the images and the text. Though she is documenting historical sites, she often composes her photographs to specifically direct a narrative, and convey a mood that she feels is present in the space through its history. In this way, Historic Homes of Florida's First Coast presents Atwood's poetic take on North Florida's history and strikes a balance between documentation and fine art." - Meredith T. Matthews, Arbus Magazine, January/February 2015 When I was a very young girl living in southeastern Tennessee, my grandmother lived in Miami.  My earliest memory of Florida is of my parents driving us to Miami for a Christmas visit.  We drove down via the Florida Turnpike, through the orange groves, at night - and there must have been a freeze that night because there were smelting pots burning in all of the groves.  I can clearly remember thinking, as any small child would, that the entire state was on fire.  So my first impression of people who live in Florida was that they were all either - A) totally crazy or B) incredibly courageous.  When I was ten years old, my parents decided to move the family to Florida.  It must be said, that even as a young child, I had an overly romantic imagination and my only real exposure to Florida had been through those visits to Miami - so I fully expected to be living in a tropical paradise, with palm trees and flamingos in my back yard.  However, my parents moved us to a very small and very rural North Florida town named Lawtey....so the reality failed to match up to my romantic tropical dream.  By the time I entered the sixth grade we had moved to the city of Jacksonville, and it was there that I experienced my first exposure to Florida history.  I can't recall the name of my sixth grade teacher, or the names of any of my classmates from that year.  But I can clearly recall the Florida history textbook which was issued to me.  It had a yellow cover which featured a picture of a Spanish conquistador, dressed in green clothing and wearing his metal breastplate and helmet.  In my overly romantic ten year old imagination, he looked to be a very heroic figure.   And as I read the stories of the early explorers such as Hernando de Soto and Juan Ponce de Leon, I began - for the first time - to fall in love with Florida history.  Even then I thought about how much courage it must have taken to leave behind your homeland, sail across the Atlantic, and explore a completely unknown area.  Many years later, I accompanied my own child on his fifth grade safety patrol trip to Washington DC.  There, in the Smithsonian Museum of American history, I saw an exhibit which forever changed the way I view the subject of history - the Revolutionary War gunboat Philadelphia, which was sunk by a British cannonball during the battle of Lake Champlain.  At just over fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide, the boat seemed shockingly small to me.  I couldn't imagine