Carolyn Lee Whiting Hentz

Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz

Portrayed by Michelle McMillan Kirby

All Rights Reserved®

Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz

Michelle McMillan Kirby as
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz

My name is Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz.  I was born in 1800 in Massachusetts.  I was born into a very patriotic family with my father serving as a soldier in the Revolutionary War and three of my brothers fought in the War of 1812.  I won my first writing contest at age 12 and won a $500 prize for my five act play “De Lara.”     I met my husband Nicholas and married at age 24.  We moved around seven states as my husband and I served as educators and opened several schools.  One of my favorite places was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where my Nicholas was the chair of modern languages.  We founded a girl’s school in Kentucky and only stayed there two years before moving on to Cincinnati, Ohio where I joined the Semi Colon Club and became acquainted with Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Unfortunately, we had to leave Ohio suddenly as my husband became very jealous of my friends in the Club, especially Colonel King who sent me an improper note.    This caused us to relocate to Alabama for a time where we opened another school in Tuskeegee, then another in Georgia.  Shortly thereafter, my Nicholas became an invalid and which left me to support our family and brought us here to Florida. 

When I heard about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I was outraged.  Thus, I wrote one of my best works – The Northern Planter’s Bride which was published in 1854.  My book explains the caring relationships between master and slave and I certainly did all I could to discredit the widely accepted belief of universal inhumane treatment of the Southern slave.  After all, I would know better than Harriet about what it’s really like in the South – I actually lived here for decades.  I believed the abolitionist movement to end slavery was more of a desire for personal gain than to actually tear down the institution of slavery.   I was not that well but continued to write.   I wrote at my Nicholas’s bedside until I became too ill to write.  In 1856, I died just months before him and we are buried together here. 

I had five children who joined me here in Marianna.  My son Dr. Thaddeus Hentz was the town dentist and was wounded in the volley fired at the Marianna Home Guard following their surrender.  He had a finger shot off and it was believed he was firing from behind my monument.  His work in facial prosthetics was tremendous.  It has been send he could make them so lifelike they could not be distinguished from a person’s actual face.    My other son Charles was not at Marianna but served as a surgeon at the Battle of Natural Bridge which, historically, would be six months from the events of this weekend.