Florida's Fabled Inns, lavishly illustrated, highlights the state's appeal as a tourist mecca from the1820s, soon after the United States purchased Florida from Spain, up to the early 1950s when the big hotels in Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami, Tallahassee, Pensacola and other cities were going strong, Miami Beach's Fontainebleau was rising on the Harvey Firestone estate, and the site of the Magic Kingdom was a cow pasture. The motel industry was in its infancy. Louise Frisbie invites the reader to share a close-up view of the elaborate hotels of the Plant and Flagler chains, built in the 1880s and 1890s, such as the Breakers at Palm Beach and the Belleview Biltmore at Clearwater; Jacksonville's lavish 19th Century St. James, Windsor, Carleton and others, beginning with Dawson & Buckles' crude inn of the 1820s and Isaiah Hart's of the 1830s; the Miami-Miami Beach hotels of the early 20th Century and the ' 'boom" of the 1920s; tiny Peacock Inn of the 1880s at Coconut Grove; Orlando's primitive 19th Century inns and their latter-day counterparts; Tampa's Thomas Jefferson, Hillsboro and others, beginning with the Kilgore in 1837; the sophisticated old Escambia at Pensacola, and its 20th Century successor, the elegant San Carlos; Tallahassee hotels from the 1820s; the original Detroit, St. Petersburg's first hotel, and those which followed; George Lizotte's tiny Bonhomie and others at Pass-a-Grille; old hotels in Florida Panhandle towns, and others, large and small, representing coastal and interior Florida from Pensacola to Key West. Included in the Jacksonville chapter is a brief description of a specialized kind of public house, with photos--Cora Crane's elegant bordello, the Court.