The Hentz Family Papers document four generations of white family members from France, Alabama, and Florida, chiefly after they removed from France to the United States in 1815. Materials include personal, medical, financial, and legal papers, diaries and autobiographies, and photographs. Correspondence and diaries describe activities of family and friends in Alabama and Florida, teaching at a female academy in Alabama, medical and dental practices, citrus-farming, a Confederate soldier's camp life and experiences as a prisoner of war, and travel of a Confederate ex-patriate family from Rio de Janeiro back to Florida. Of note is the autobiography of Charles A. Hentz (1827-1894), who expanded on his diaries with more extensive description of inhabitants of and life in Louisville, Ky., Cincinnati, Ohio, New Orleans, La., Mobile and Tuskegee, Ala., and Jackson and Gadsden counties, Fla.; travels in the southern United States; the Mexican War; his medical education and practice; alcoholism, recreational drug use, and drug addicts in the community; the flora and fauna of the Panhandle region of Florida; a journey on horseback to Tampa Bay, Fla.; treatment of the wounded at the battles of Marianna and Natural Bridge, Fla.; the execution of Confederate deserters; and his citrus and vegetable farms in City Point, Brevard County, Fla. Hentz wrote chiefly about white people's lived experiences, but he also described attitudes toward enslaved people and racial violence, including beatings and a lynching. His medical notebooks document his most interesting cases, as well as more routine obstetrical care, for both white and Black patients. Hentz recorded case descriptions, geographic locations, and names of patients, and in some cases their enslavers. Other items include military records of an officer in the French Imperial Army; notes and writings on yellow fever and grave-robbing for dissection purposes, descriptions of fish and plants, and drafts of plays and stories; drawings and pictures of human, botanical, and animal subjects; biographical and genealogical sketches; a phrenological character analysis; photographic portraits; and a Hentz Family Bible.
