A Cracker Classic
By Randy Noles • Photography by: Florida Department of
Environmental Protection

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home is an oasis of Old Florida charm.

Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides, we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon. That’s how Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who in 1928 moved to Alachua County from Rochester, N.Y., began Cross Creek, a classic 1942 book describing her self-imposed, bare-bones existence in rural Northeast Florida. Originally, the writer’s heart-of-pine Cracker house was three separate structures. Rawlings, as her income allowed, connected the buildings with a bathroom, screened porches and verandas while carefully tending her vegetable gardens, citrus trees and flocks of chickens. When she died in 1953, Rawlings left her property to the University of Florida. But for the past two decades the circa-1870s house and the 70 acres surrounding it have been managed by the Florida Park Service. The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site, located about 15 miles south of Gainesville near the quaint town of Micanopy, is, like its namesake, entirely unpretentious. Although a Park Service spokesperson says that about 30,000 people per year visit the site, it’s rarely if ever crowded. Indeed, the site’s isolation is integral to its laid-back charm. There’s been virtually no development in the surrounding area, which still consists of dense hammocks, rolling cow pastures and old-growth citrus groves flanking two-lane country roads. This part of the region is truly an Old Florida oasis, unspoiled, unadorned and essentially unchanged from the time Rawlings arrived at her new home. Visitors to the Rawlings house are greeted by guides dressed in 1930s-style calico dresses and aprons. They lead small groups from room to room, describing the writer’s life and work and her attachment to this “small place of enchantment,” where she typed on the breezy screened porch, prepared Florida-themed dishes in the modest kitchen and welcomed guests such as African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Although Rawlings’ views on race were more advanced than many in her era, she was no crusader: Bethune and Hurston slept not in the main house, but in the tenant house with Idella Parker, Rawlings’ maid. “Mrs. Rawlings was especially attached to the house at Cross Creek and didn’t care if people thought it was grand,” wrote Parker in her 1992 book Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid”. “She was not pretentious at all... she cared very little about having fine houses and fancy dresses.” Without question, the nameless bureaucrats who resisted the urge to transform this rustic retreat into a Disneyesque Rawlings World must be applauded for their painful restraint. Inside the house, battered volumes line open bookshelves, simple clothes hang in a makeshift closet and worn linoleum covers the bathroom floor. On a small table on the front porch sits Rawlings’ Royal manual typewriter, surrounded by a few sheets of wadded paper and adjacent to a glass ash tray containing a snuffed out cigarette. Outside, a pampered cat can be spotted lounging in a sunny spot near the vegetable garden, oblivious to the free-ranging chickens scratching about the sandy soil. The home was, in fact, a working farm. The Washington, D.C.-bred and University of Wisconsin-educated Rawlings, an unlikely farmer, routinely sent crates of citrus to her Northern friends. A weathered barn adjacent to the house contains an array of museum-quality farm implements, some of which were used by Rawlings and her hired hands.

Today the grove and the vegetable garden are maintained by volunteers. And in the winter, staffers use the house’s vintage wood stove to whip up dishes using home-grown ingredients and recipes culled from Rawlings’ book Cross Creek Cookery, the follow-up to Cross Creek. “I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing,” Rawlings once said. She would almost certainly be pleased to see the kitchen still in use. Killing freezes and Rawlings’ admittedly haphazad management of her groves prevented them from ever becoming more than a hobby. And as Rawlings’ reputation – and income – increased, she no longer needed to sell fruit to maintain her home and her lifestyle. The Yearling, a timeless tear-jerker about the ill-fated friendship between a young boy and a deer, won a Pulitzer Prize and became a No. 1 bestseller in 1939. Suddenly, Rawlings found herself with what must have seemed to be a small fortune, particularly to a woman who had become accustomed to growing her own food and living in an isolated backwoods outpost with few luxuries at her disposal. Rawlings had previously rented a Crescent Beach home from its original builder and owner, Ralph Poole, one of the founders of Marineland. Then, it was dubbed Goat Hill by locals because Poole kept a goat tethered in the front yard, providing both lawn maintenance and a steady source of free fertilizer. The colorful Poole, ironically, also boasted of literary connections. His uncle, Ernest Poole, had published a book called His Family, which had won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918. In fact, Rawlings’ short story, The Pelican’s Shadow, is said to be based on unflattering tales about his employer that Poole’s butler blithely passed along to the inquisitive writer. Rawlings finally bought the Poole property and an adjacent lot in 1939, probably for little more than several thousand dollars. However, she did not live there full time until several years later, after marrying Norton Baskin, owner of the Castle Warden Hotel (now the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum) in the heart of St. Augustine. At first, the couple lived in a penthouse at Baskin’s hotel. But Rawlings, now a national figure, found it difficult to work because she was constantly besieged by tourists and locals familiar with her books.

So Rawlings and Baskin eventually moved to the Crescent Beach cottage, which Baskin once described as resembling a choo-choo train because it was so long and narrow. There, Rawlings continued to write and to entertain illustrious guests. Although the cottage was clearly a step up from Cross Creek for Rawlings, it was in no way a showplace. And it was seemingly in the middle of nowhere, which Rawlings preferred. Ernest Hemingway, already a Key West icon, brought both his third and fourth wives to Crescent Beach when en route north. Poets Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost likewise stopped by when on lecture tours in Florida, as did such non-literary notables as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who had run against Woodrow Wilson as the Republican presidential nominee. Presumably, they did not sleep in the guest quarters. It was at the Crescent Beach cottage, which is now a private residence, where Rawlings wrote Cross Creek. A reading of it today makes it clear where her heart remained: “Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.”

(Top Left) A road-weary car and a barn filled with tools enhances the illusion that Rawlings still lives and works in the modest clapboard home. (Below) The rustic front porch reflects the Rawlings home’s laid-back charm. Photo: Brittany Dugger.

(Above) Rawlings and one of her maids, Martha Mickens, capture dinner in the person of a hapless back-yard fowl. The author’s Royal typewriter still sits on a front-porch table, flanked by a pack of Lucky Strikes.