A National Historic Landmark. Rangers in period attire conduct tours of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and grounds. The homestead is nestled between a quiet country road and Lake Orange. The park includes the home, completely restored and preserved as it was in the 1930s, a barn, tenant house, orange grove, seasonal garden, chickens, ducks, nature trail, large live oaks laced with Spanish Moss, and a Oldsmobile Hydromatic very similar Rawlings' own.Days Open: Sunday - Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday
Rawlings words grace the entrance to Cross Creek: "It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of the world and in the mysterious heart of another. After long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is the mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home."The house at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park is a prime example of Cracker architecture, an adaption to the interior North Florida climate developed by pioneers in the 1850's. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings called this Florida backwoods homestead her "place of enchantment". This is where she wrote "The Yearling" and "Cross Creek". "The Yearling" received the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into a movie starring Jane Wyman and Gregory Peck. The Yearling is a vivid portrait of the scenic and unique interior North Florida "Cracker" country and its people seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy living with his parents in the 1930's. "Cross Creek" is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' memoir.Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings first saw Florida in 1928, when she and her husband, Charles Rawlings, traveled from their home in Rochester, NY to visit Charles' brothers. Later that year, using a small inheritance from her mother, Marjorie and Charles bought a house and orange orchard on 70 acres in Cross Creek, Florida. Charles left Cross Creek in 1933 when the couple divorced. Marjorie stayed and became a famous writer.With her fame and fortune Rawlings could have chosen to be a darling of high society and the literary world, but she stayed put. Despite being a transplanted northerner with sophisticated taste and a college education, Marjorie endeared herself to her neighbors by learning and respecting their ways. She could "cuss and drink along with the best of them." She wrote of her home: "But what of the land? It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the season, to the cosmic secrecy of seeds, and beyond, to all time."The U.S. Postal Service honored Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings with the 2008 Literary Arts Commemorative Stamp, the 24th in the Literary Arts series. The foreground is a portrait of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings based on an undated photograph and the background depicts a fawn at an interior North Florida watering hole. The "first day of issue" celebration was held at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park on February 21, 2008.
Virtual tour Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society Hours: Open daily 9a-5p. Guided tours October-July Thurs-Fri-Sat-Sun 10a 11a 1p 2p 3p 4p.Tour begins at barn, goes through farmyard, and then through house. Group tours Tuesday or Wednesday only, reservations (352) 466.3672.Admission: $2 per vehicle. Guided tour $3 per adult, children 6 to 12 years old $2, under 6 free.Located at 18700 S. CR 325, Cross Creek, Florida, 18 miles southeast from Gainesville.
