Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park

As you pull in, there is a magical place on the right. There is a boat launch on the left.
The historic site (to the right) is where Marjorie Kinnin Rawlings actually lived when she composed Cross Creek and The Yearling. I was treated to a very informative tour of the site by an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate volunteer. The folks who run this place do it as a labor of love. That is rare, so do enjoy it. It’s $ 3 to park and an additional fee, I don’t know how much, for the tour. The tour is not to be missed.
The site itself is beautifully maintained and, though it’s on a country road, keeps what must be a lot of its charm from the early 1900s. A healthy orange and grapefruit grove occupies most of the tract, along with the original house and barn from almost a century ago where one of our great literary giants composed her masterpieces.
If you go to the left, on the other hand, you’ll see a bit of waterfront with a boat launch, a few picnic tables, and a lot of grass. If you’re as lucky as I was, some country folk will be blasting a song about trucks and Miller Lite while they put their boat in the water. Mike Huckabee prefers taking that left turn. Guns, god, and gravy y’all!

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her first husband moved to rural Cross Creek when she purchased a small orange grove here in the early 1930s. While she was enchanted with the local environment and people, her husband Charles was not and divorced her and left Cross Creek, leaving her to tend to this small farm as well as the writing which would make her famous. Obviously, anyone interested in Rawlings’ novels needs to see this place, because things have been kept pretty much as she had them when she lived here but the homestead also should interest anyone into Southern or Floridian history and how people in rural areas lived at this time. Rawlings was more affluent than her neighbors, certainly, and she was the first person in this area to get indoor plumbing, but she nonetheless had a pretty hard life here. The area is not just rural, but rustic and even today this is very clear. Gainesville at the time was tremendously smaller than today and one can imagine that even if she had some money, things were far from easy for Rawlings. Just the time that went into housekeeping and preparing food was much greater then than today: Rawlings had citrus crops, a garden, and chickens and ducks to tend to and the staff of the State Park have done a good job making this clear and tangible, still keeping the garden and animals as Mrs. Rawlings did herself.
Something should be said of the rangers here: they are and as far as I know have always been women and have backgrounds in fields like English literature or anthropology – so it’s nearly like speaking with Rawlings herself as they talk about her life; someone in planning this park has done a great job in ensuring the rangers are very interested in this site and that you don’t have some random ranger who was working a typical State Park and knows more about snakes or controlled burns than about Rawlings. One of these Rawlings house rangers, Sally Morrison, wrote a cookbook based on her efforts to try Rawlings’ recipes (Rawlings also wrote a cookbook) in the 1980s. The Morrison cookbook and Rawlings cookbook together provide a very good portrait of both traditional Florida cracker cooking and general domestic life and history.

An interesting place to visit to see how people lived without much in this area in the 1930’s.
Visitors to this Florida homestead can walk back in time to 1930s farm life. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked in the tiny community of Cross Creek. Her cracker style home and farm, where she lived for 25 years and wrote her Pulitzer prize-​winning novel The Yearling, has been restored and is preserved as it was when she lived here. Rawlings farmyard, grove, and nature trails are open 9:00
5:00 p.m. daily, throughout the year. Visitors may tour the house with a ranger in period costume from October through July, Thursday through Sunday five times daily, except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Picnic facilities are located in the adjacent county park.