Join the Historical Society of Avon Park for Peggy Macdonald’s Florida Female Pioneers. Florida’s Female Pioneers explores some of the founding women who have shaped Florida, including Esther Hill Hawks, a physician who ran the first racially integrated school in Florida. Harriet Beecher Stowe kick-started Florida’s tourism industry with her 1873 book, Palmetto Leaves. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the first in her family to be born into freedom, became one