A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith (1984) — The defining Florida novel, following three generations of a Florida Cracker family from the 1850s through the early 20th century. Smith traces the transformation of wild Florida — the palmetto prairies, the river hammocks, the cattle drives — into subdivisions and tourist traps with genuine grief. The Loxahatchee country and the landscape around it feels exactly like what Smith is mourning. Essential reading for understanding why South Florida looks the way it does.
The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1947) — The book that saved the Everglades, or at least bought them time. Douglas was the first writer to describe the Everglades not as a swamp to be drained but as a vast slow-moving river of extraordinary ecological complexity. Her advocacy, launched from this book, shaped Florida conservation for the rest of the century. The Loxahatchee watershed connects to the same system she describes, and reading her account of what was lost and nearly lost adds weight to every manatee sighting.
Jonathan Dickinson's Journal by Jonathan Dickinson (1699) — The original account of Dickinson's shipwreck and captivity among the Hobe people on the coast just north of Tequesta. Dickinson was a Quaker merchant sailing from Jamaica to Philadelphia when his ship grounded on the barrier island. He and his party were captured, marched north, and eventually released — his journal records the journey through what is now Palm Beach and Martin counties with a pragmatic precision that makes it one of the most valuable documents of pre-colonial South Florida. The landscape he describes is still recognisable along the river that now bears his name.