Qualla: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceil Daniels, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1928, a restless writer from Washington, D.C. drove south into the Florida interior, past the tourist beaches and resort towns, until the paved roads gave out and the live oaks closed overhead. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings found what she was looking for in Cross Creek, a hamlet so small it barely existed on maps, wedged between two lakes in Alachua County. She and her husband Charles bought a 72-acre orange grove with a rambling dogtrot house at its center, and Marjorie set about transforming both the property and herself. Within a decade, she would win the Pulitzer Prize. The farmstead where she did it still stands, preserved almost exactly as she left it.

Image: Ceil Daniels | CC BY-SA 3.0

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park: The Cracker House on Orange Lake

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceil Daniels, CC BY-SA 3.0. The heart of the homestead is a single-story wood-frame house built around a 19th-century dogtrot core, that classic Florida vernacular design where a covered breezeway splits the structure in two, funneling whatever wind exists through the living quarters. Rawlings and her husba...

Image: Ceil Daniels | CC BY-SA 3.0

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park: Writing the Scrub Into Literature

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Todd Van Hoosear, CC BY-SA 2.0. Rawlings published her first stories about rural Florida life in Scribner's Magazine, drawing immediate attention for the way she captured the dialect, rhythms, and hardship of the Cracker communities around her. She divorced Charles Rawlings in 1933 but stayed on at Cross Creek ...

Image: Todd Van Hoosear | CC BY-SA 2.0

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park: A Legacy Rooted in Place

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. Rawlings married Norton Baskin in 1941 and began splitting her time between Cross Creek and St. Augustine, but she kept returning to the farmstead to write until her death in 1953 at age 57. She bequeathed the property to a foundation of the University of Florida, and the state h...

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY 2.5

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park: Cross Creek Today

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. The park occupies a small but evocative footprint on the shore of Orange Lake, with adjacent public lands that were historically part of the Rawlings property. Two short hiking trails wind through the hammock, and a boat ramp provides access to the lake. Guided tours of the house...

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY 2.5