Jay's Journeys

Cross Creek 

By JAY FLAGLER

In the 1930s, a cracker farmhouse in the remote scrub hammock countryside of north central Florida was home to well known author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She called it her "small place of enchantment." Today, the site, located southeast of Gainesville, is a national historic 

The cracker farmhouse in the remote scrub hammock countryside of north central Florida was home to well known author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

landmark.

It was at a handmade table on the house’s front porch that the author penned all the stories that secured her literary fame, including the 1939 Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Yearling. That fame made her name synonymous with Cross Creek, the short waterway that connects nearby Orange and Lockloosa Lakes.

In her writing she captured the creek’s beautiful, wild scenery and immortalized the simple, earthy people living along its banks who eked out a rugged existence and provided limitless fodder for her tales. She modified and expanded the house over the years, such as the indoor plumbing she installed with the proceeds from the sale of one of her books. At her death in 1953, she left the house to the University of Florida where she once taught creative writing.

Today the house and farm are managed by the Florida Parks Service and offer visitors a unique opportunity to experience the setting the author lived in and wrote about on a daily basis. Park manager Valerie Rivers has noted: "When visitors come, they experience the whole sense of what life was like when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived here."

Ducks, guinea fowl and chickens freely roam the grounds.

Sitting amidst a citrus grove, the white clapboard house with its long porches and wood shingled roof is pristine, thanks to the careful efforts of staff to interpret and preserve the 1930s setting.

Nearby are the barn, the tenant house and the chicken coop. Ducks, guinea fowl and chickens freely roam the grounds.

The kitchen garden still produces many of the vegetables and herbs Marjorie loved to cook with. When the seasonal flowers also planted in the garden are blooming, butterflies are abundant.

The entire house is filled with furnishings contemporary to the era, many of them the original. Visitors can see Ms. Rawling’s bedroom, where she had breakfast in bed each morning, as was her custom.

On the library shelves are volumes by writers she admired (Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston were personal friends). Her writing table looks as if she just took a break from her typewriter to have a cup of tea and will be back any moment.

The old wood stove is still used by park staff to cook the same recipes made famous in  Cross Creek Cooking.

The working kitchen is filled with vintage cooking gear where park staff, dressed in authentic 1930s calico house dresses, often cook on the old wood stove using recipes that Ms. Rawlings made famous in her cookbook Cross Creek Cooking.

The tenant house has also been preserved. Overalls, aprons and cotton dresses hang on the outdoor clothesline. Guests can relax on the porch in the hand-made ladder back chairs and soak up the serenity that permeates the grounds.

From the farmhouse, it’s a short drive to town, to Cross Creek Restaurant where hungry visitors can eat their fill of venison, quail, alligator tail and other local culinary delights while listening to an acoustic guitarist playing authentic blues.

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site is located about 15 miles south of Gainesville. Admission is $3 for adults and $2 for children 6-12. The house is closed in August and September for maintenance.

For more information and directions go to floridastateparks.org. Click on find a park, then click on northeast region. Scroll to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Or call 352-466-3672.