Cross Creek

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Homestead

“Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon.”

This is how author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings began the story of her life in rural Florida in her bestselling book Cross Creek. Cross Creek was not only a place, it was a state of mind. For Rawlings, born and raised in Washington, D.C , Cross Creek, as primitive as it was compared to the big cities she had lived in, was home. “When I came to the Creek, I knew the old grove and the farmhouse at once as home,” she wrote.

Marjorie Kinnan was born on August 8, 1896 and was a writer from an early age. In 1907 she received her first payment for her writing efforts, a $2 prize for a story published in the Washington Post. After graduating from high school she attended the University of Wisconsin, where she became a member of the Delta Gamma Sorority, the drama society, and the women’s honor society. She graduated in 1918 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. After graduating, she married aspiring writer Charles Rawlings, and the couple moved to Rochester, New York, where both worked for area newspapers.

Tired of the cold weather of New York, Charles and Marjorie began looking for a warmer climate. Charles’ brothers were involved in real estate speculation in Florida, and the couple asked them to find a suitable home to relocate to. The Rawlings’ brothers began their search, and soon came upon a run-down 72-acre citrus farm at Cross Creek, a few miles southeast of Gainesville. In 1928 Charles and Marjorie purchased the farm sight unseen and moved to Cross Creek. Their new home included two cows, a pair of mules, 150 chicken coops, a rusty planter, a reaper, cultivators, and an ancient rattletrap Ford truck.

They had visions of earning a nice profit from their orange groves while living as carefree writers, Charles specializing in yachting stories, while Marjorie wrote gothic romances. This was not to be. The stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression wiped out any profits they hoped to make from their produce. With a crate of oranges selling for just a nickel, it cost more to pick and pack the oranges than they could sell them for. For Marjorie, having their dream collapse did not seem to matter. She had become enamored with the untamed landscape and the simplicity of the rural lifestyle.

After many rejections, Marjorie finally sold two short stories in 1930, and once the barrier was broken, her writing career began to take off. In 1933 she received the O. Henry Award for her story of a young widow living in rural Florida during the Prohibition days titled Gal Young’Un.

As her professional career began to take off, Marjorie’s personal life began to take a downturn. Perhaps because Charles did not have Marjorie’s literary success, friction began to grow between the couple, and they divorced in 1933. Never happy in Florida, Charles returned to New York, while Marjorie remained at Cross Creek.

She turned away from the romance novels she had written earlier and began to write about the world right outside her door. She immersed herself in the rural lifestyle, learning all she could about every plant, tree, and flower in the region. She cooked three meals daily on a woodstove, and washed her clothing in an iron pot. At first wary of this strange outsider, the local “Crackers” who were her neighbors very quickly warmed to Marjorie and she became a part of the community.

1933 was a pivotal year for Marjorie. Not only did she win the O. Henry Award and divorce Charles, but she also had her first novel published, South Moon Under. The book told the story of a Florida moonshiner and his family. Marjorie wrote about real people, her friends and neighbors at Cross Creek, and the public loved her tales of the wild land and the people who lived on it. In 1935 Golden Apples was published, and she hit the big time in 1938 when her best-known book, The Yearling, made its appearance. The story of a young Cracker boy who adopts an orphaned fawn was an instant hit and won Marjorie the Pulitzer Prize.

Even with her growing fame, Marjorie remained very close to the land and people who made up Cross Creek. She was just as at home with her poor neighbors as she was with famous new friends like Scribner’s magazine editor Maxwell Perkins, and authors like Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell, and Robert Frost, all of whom made their way to Cross Creek to visit. Marjorie was also a strong early supporter of civil rights, and was friends with Indira Ghandi.

In 1940 Marjorie’s book When the Whippoorwill was published, followed in 1942 with another bestseller, Cross Creek. This latest title was autobiographical in nature, telling of her life in the tiny Florida hamlet, and the people round her. It remains one of the author’s most popular works. Marjorie loved food and entertaining, so in 1942 she also published Cross Creek Cookery, a combination cookbook and reference to the rural lifestyle. This book, too, remains popular even today. By the end of 1942, both The Yearling and Cross Creek had been published in thirteen foreign languages. Soon after a movie version of The Yearling was released, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.

Marjorie did her writing on the front porch of her home, where she could look out on the road and wave at whoever might pass by, and have a view of her orange groves. Though she might be famous now, she was the same beloved person to her rural neighbors. She had the only automobile in the area, and was a notoriously bad driver. She ran into the ditch so many times that an informal “rescue squad” of neighbors was organized. Whenever someone heard her honk the car’s horn three times, they knew it was the signal to hitch up a mule and come pull Marjorie back onto the road!

Life was not all wonderful for Marjorie, despite her success and her love for Cross Creek. She had a drinking problem and was subject to deep depressions and “black moods.” At the urging of an opportunistic lawyer, her best friend sued Marjorie for slander for writing about her in one of her books, a case that dragged out for five years and forever hurt their friendship.

In 1941 Marjorie married hotel owner Norris Baskin, and by most reports their relationship was happy and comfortable. Baskin respected his new wife’s need to be alone to write, visiting but never living at Cross Creek, and she divided her time between their home in Crescent Beach, just south of St. Augustine, and Cross Creek.

Marjorie’s last book, The Sojourner, was published in 1953, and in December of that same year she died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 57. She was buried in Antioch Cemetery, near her beloved Cross Creek.

A long-time supporter of the University of Florida, Marjorie bequeathed her property to the university, envisioning it as a place where students and faculty could come for inspiration. Unfortunately, over time the old farm became a party spot for fraternity boys, who trashed the farmhouse and nearly everything in it. By 1970 the house was in terrible condition and in need of a major renovation. There was talk of bulldozing it, but the Florida Parks Service took over the property and began an extensive restoration project that was not finished until 1996.

Today Marjorie’s home and a portion of her citrus groves at Cross Creek are encompassed by the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. Visitors can walk through the restored citrus groves, peer into the barn and other outbuildings, and take a guided tour of the house, which has been restored to what it was like during the author’s time here.

Stepping through the gate into the citrus grove, you feel like you are stepping back in time. There is the pasture where Dora, Marjorie’s ill-tempered Jersey cow that gave such rich cream, grazed. Chickens scratch through the grass, and bees hum in the air. These are not the original trees that were here during Marjorie’s residency – those were destroyed by the rambunctious college crowds that partied here, but these trees were grown from original rootstock or seeds.

The eight-room main house, made from cypress and heart pine, was created from three separate buildings connected by porches. On the now-screened veranda is the cypress table holding the typewriter Marjorie wrote with, and a cot where she would take a nap during the heat of the afternoon. Marjorie loved animals and always had a couple of dogs and a few cats around the place. Today’s tour guides make sure there is always a critter or two around to greet visitors. What you probably won’t see is a raccoon like the pet Marjorie kept, who was fond of crawling into the wooden ice box to cool off, giving the unsuspecting ice man a surprise on more than one occasion when he opened the door!

The living room is just as it was in Marjorie’s time with a display of her books, the crude electric lighting she had installed, and the closet where she stored her firewood and hid her bootleg booze during Prohibition.

Marjorie was the first in the region to have indoor plumbing, including a bathtub. When she had the tub installed, it was all the talk locally, and she threw a party to show it off to her friends and neighbors, filling the tub with ice for the occasion and the toilet bowl with roses! Marjorie was never happier than when she was entertaining, and the dining room is furnished with her Hitchcock chairs and Wedgwood china.

The guest bedroom saw many famous personalities. Here is the bed Marjorie loaned to the film crew and where Gregory Peck suffered from a rattlesnake bite in the movie The Yearling. Robert Frost, Wendell Wilkie, and Margaret Mitchell were just a few of the big names of their time who slept in this bed.

The house’s Cracker-style design is perfect for this part of Florida – open porches, tall ceilings, and lots of windows and screen doors to take advantage of the breeze during hot weather. Four fireplaces and a wood burning stove in the kitchen took the chill off on cold winter days.

On the property is also a Cracker-style house much like what Marjorie’s neighbors lived in, built for economy and practicality and spare on creature comforts.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Sites, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park is located just southeast of Gainesville, on County Road 325. There is room for RVs to park if the place is not too crowded, though access could be difficult for larger rigs. The park is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $2 per car. Tours of the house are conducted Thursday through Sunday. House tours are $3 for adults, and $2 for children. For more information, call (352) 466-3672 or log onto the Internet at www.FloridaStateParks.org.

Visitors to Cross Creek often say it is a place of peace and reflection, seemingly enchanted and falling under the same spell that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did when she first arrived. A spell that would last all of her life and speak to the world through her books. Indeed, Cross Creek is not just a place, it is a state of mind.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ended her book Cross Creek with words that sum up her feelings, as well as our own, about the home she loved and drew so much inspiration from. “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 seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.”