Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park

Marjorie Rawlings first came to Florida and discovered her beauty in 1928 she was only thirty two years old married to her college sweetheart and the two of them were writers and they have been writing for newspapers and magazines and decided that they needed to take a vacation so they came to florida in 1928 to visit Charles' two brothers who were living not far from where we're standing right now and once they came into Florida and smelled the orange blossoms blooming saw the brilliant sunshine and lovely vegetation and met some of the cracker people they were enthralled with Florida and they had left snow behind on the ground where they were living in Rochester, New York so didn't take long for Marjorie to say to Charles let's sell everything and move to Florida oh how we could write she was so inspired by the landscape and her people that she really wanted to get out of journalism and get into writing novels and this was going to be a chance to do that and then when she saw orange groves everywhere in this part of the state she thought that's what i'll do a by a growth of farm house and will sell our grown oranges for a living whilel we struggle with our writing careers well they were young and naive didn't know anything about growing oranges but the brothers knew that this farmstead was on the market it was the old Armstrong homestead had seventy four acres with it and fifteen hundred citrus trees already producing so they bought it moved down here in the fall of that year nineteen twenty eight and have never been through a Florida summer they really didn't know what their up against with the head and the mosquitos but they were young and gung ho and so the story begins in nineteen twenty eight it was a full ten years before miss Rawlings found success with her writing with the "Yearling" and that would have been in nineteen thirty eight the Pulitzer was won the following year in nineteen thirty nine so it has been seventy-five years since she won that award and so we are celebrating the year of the yearling this year from April 2013 until April 2014 her novel, "The Yearling", is set from April to April so that seems an appropriate time span to do the celebration she called this place home for over twenty five years and would remain here until her death in nineteen fifty three she was young she was only fifty seven years old and never had any children and that's how the place ended up in the hands of the state we have kept as it as it was when miss Rawlings lived here, most of the furnishings in the house are hers as well as the artwork on the walls and the china in the cabinets in the dining room so we like folks to visit and step back in time with us to the nineteen thirties of old Florida farm life