Qualla: Lichgate on High Road https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:13 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Lichgate on High Road https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road Lichgate on High Road: Introduction https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road/ Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1956, Laura Jepsen walked past a pasture just outside the Tallahassee city limits and stopped. Standing alone in the center of the field was a live oak tree so old and so massive that its branches had long since bent to the ground and risen again, forming a canopy that seemed to breathe. Jepsen, a comparative literature professor at Florida State University, did what a scholar of myth and symbolism would do -- she bought the field, three acres of it, specifically to protect that single tree. Then she built a cottage beside it unlike anything else in Florida: steep-roofed, Tudor-framed, a 16th-century English fantasy conjured from cypress, granite, and ship's planking in the middle of the Florida Panhandle. She called the property Lichgate, after the gates in English churchyards that mark the threshold between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Read more: Lichgate on High Road on Qualla

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/djkj-lichgate-on-high-road-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Lichgate on High Road: A Cottage from Borrowed Time https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road/ Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jepsen purchased the property in 1955 from representatives of the Capital City Free Will Baptist Church, a congregation that was never actually established. The sale included covenants preventing development for 25 years. She drew her design from many sources, but the primary ins...

Read more: Lichgate on High Road on Qualla

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/djkj-lichgate-on-high-road-a-cottage-from-borrowed-time.mp3 0:06 2 full Lichgate on High Road: The Matriarch Oak https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road/ Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The live oak that stopped Jepsen in her tracks is estimated to be over 300 years old. Its canopy spreads wide enough to shade the entire clearing around the cottage, its limbs dipping to the earth and arching back up in the slow-motion acrobatics characteristic of Southern live o...

Read more: Lichgate on High Road on Qualla

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/djkj-lichgate-on-high-road-the-matriarch-oak.mp3 0:06 3 full Lichgate on High Road: The Professor's World https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road/ Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. Laura Jepsen taught comparative literature at Florida State University from 1946 to 1978, over three decades during which she shaped generations of students. She never married and had no children. Her life revolved around scholarship, teaching, and the property she had built as a...

Read more: Lichgate on High Road on Qualla

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/djkj-lichgate-on-high-road-the-professors-world.mp3 0:06 4 full Lichgate on High Road: Christmas Eve, and After https://qualla.com/lichgate-on-high-road/ Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jepsen died on Christmas Eve, 1995. She left no immediate heirs, and Lichgate along with her other properties passed to The Nature Conservancy. Plans emerged to sell the land for commercial development -- the three acres on High Road had become valuable real estate as Tallahassee...

Read more: Lichgate on High Road on Qualla

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/k/j/lichgate-on-high-road-wp/djkj-lichgate-on-high-road-christmas-eve-and-after.mp3 0:06 5 full