Back Roads to Cross Creek

     Just south of Gainesville, in a part of Florida I hadn't visited before, I found a piece of Florida that made my history-loving soul giddy. Most people, including myself, speed by on nearby Interstate 75 on their way to or from much bigger and seemingly more adventurous destinations. But this time, I had the great good fortune to be traveling with a loved one who indulges my inner history geek. We actually exited off of the interstate.


     It took twenty minutes or so of driving through North Florida countryside over two lane roads lined by trees with limbs dripping  spanish moss to arrive at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in Cross Creek, Florida. The further we drove into the Florida wilderness, the further it felt we turned back the clock. By the time we arrived at the Park, we were in the 1930s.

     We parked the car on what one of the brochures said was originally Ms. Rawlings cow pasture. The brochure claimed that Rawlings said the cow "had an evil temper but gave the richest cream." (www.FloridaStateParks.org).  On foot, we walked through the gate and headed through what was a citrus grove. Not too many trees are in the grove now, but there are enough to tell how it might have looked. We passed the barn, reconstructed to look as if it had been standing solidly there for a hundred years, and the chicken coop, complete with chickens, to arrive at the house.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Farm House

     When Rawlings moved to this area in 1928, the house was actually three separate buildings that had been assembled gradually over the past forty years and connected with porches. The same brochure said that it was an "old board and batten house...constructed mostly of heart pine in the Florida Cracker style, with its raised floor, high ceilings and many windows and doors for cross ventilation." It's been restored and the Friends of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farms, Inc. are continually working on preservation.


     I could go on and on about the house and the surrounding property, but I have to tell you that as a writer, I was drawn to the screened porch on the east side of the house. This was where Rawlings did most of her writing at a cypress table with chairs made from palmetto palm posts and deer hide. The group has even outfitted the table with a typewriter from the period, an ashtray and a box of Ms. Rawlings' favorite cigarettes. To sit at that table and ponder how to write a particular scene while looking out at the little road and trees draped with spanish moss while the scent of orange blossoms wafts gently through the screen seemed to me to be a writer's idea of heaven.

     Possibly best known for The Yearling (1938), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published books from 1933 until 2002, despite having passed away in 1953. Several books have been written about her and Cross Creek and there have been been no less than three movies based on her writing. She knew how to convey the feeling of her little town and the difficult times of her era arguably better than most.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

     Ms. Rawlings perhaps described how she felt about her farm in Cross Creek best when she said, "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 one world and in the mysterious heart of another, and after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home."

     May you find your own little corner of the world that surrounds you with this same feeling.

Copyright 2012 Ruth Hartman Berge