Many African Americans in rural Florida lived in small tenant houses like the one standing in the orange grove at the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park.

Visitors to this Florida homestead can walk back in time to 1930s farm life where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked in the tiny community of Cross Creek. Her cracker style home and farm, where she lived for 25 years and wrote her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Yearling, has been restored and is preserved as it was when she lived here.

Rawlings came to Cross Creek in 1928 and wrote with wit and affection of those who helped tend her house, grove, and garden while she worked.

The park interprets her literary legacy and the lives of those who were part of her world in Cross Creek.

The tenant house was moved to this site in 2000, replacing the original one which had been demolished.

Letters between Rawlings and friend Zora Neale Hurston (who stayed as a guest at the Rawlings home) highlight the changing racial relationships in the rural south during Reconstruction, as well as the trailblazing attitudes of the two women.

Marjorie Rawlings was honored as a First Floridian by Governor Charlie Crist in March 2009. The United States Postal Service released a commemorative stamp in 2008 honoring Rawlings and the literary arts. In 2007, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and farm yard was designated as a National Historic Landmark. Visitors may tour the house with a ranger in period costume from October through July.

Information provided by Florida Department of State.