It was accidental, really. Marjorie was born in Washington, D.C., and her path to becoming a journalist and writer took her to Madison, Wisconsin; Louisville, Kentucky; and Rochester, New York. She and her first husband visited his brothers in Cross Creek, and they sorta kinda fell in love with it. There was something about the people there, native Floridians known as "crackers," that she found fascinating, and she and her husband thought it would be a great place to focus on their writing beyond newspapers. With an inheritance, they bought some land seen only by her brothers-in-law. It was primarily orange grove, with a dilapidated house on the property. They weren't particularly interested in growing oranges but saw it as a means to the end of supporting their writing. And so, in 1928, Marjorie and her husband moved to Florida.
For a while, they barely got by. Marjorie sold some stories, and as each little pot of money came in, she used it to fix up some part of the house. It was years before it was even painted. One of the most interesting things about seeing her house was hearing about the process of bringing it to what it is today. When she arrived, there were only two rooms. Total. And no bathroom. Over time, a bedroom "wing" was built, two bathrooms were added (the first inspiring a party celebrating its inauguration complete with red roses from Marjorie's uncle in the toilet). For many years, there was no electricity, and when it finally came, Marjorie created light fixtures using some bowls she had on hand and hanging them upside down from the ceiling. There still is no air conditioning or heating, which is why there were beads of sweat running down our backs entire time we were in there.
Marjorie saw inspiration and beauty in her surroundings, coming to love the smell of the orange blossoms and developing close relationships with her neighbors. A lot of the setting and culture can be found in her writing, and she even stayed with a moonshiner in Ocala for a while to add realism to her work. Her husband, however, was not as enamored of Florida, and they soon divorced. As far as I could tell, this seemed to be fine by Marjorie, who spent her days writing on the front porch at this very table and typewriter, surrounded by her oranges, chickens, and ducks. According to the ranger who toured us through the house, she ate her breakfast on the porch, staying out there all morning to write, so intensely that the neighbors passing by the main road in front of the house knew not to stop and chat. The porch is even furnished with a bed on the opposite side from the writing table so she could nap through the afternoon heat. 
The volunteers who manage the house have worked really hard to maintain it in the style that Marjorie put together over many years (right down to the closet that became a bar). They continue to grow oranges and take care of the garden she kept outside her kitchen window. Her second husband allowed them to use much of her original furniture, right down to this adorable juicer in the kitchen. The beds are hers as well, and we were told some fascinating stories of the people who slept there while visiting Marjorie, including Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, and Robert Frost. They said that Gregory Peck also stayed there, but if you saw the length of that bed in the guest room, you'd share my serious doubts. Her cast iron stove also remains, and in the winter, the rangers and volunteers cook recipes from Marjorie's cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery. A copy of the book is propped open in her kitchen to a recipe of hers the volunteers like to make for an "utterly deadly southern pecan pie," which I've already decided I must return to the farm for in December. There's another, supposedly less-deadly, recipe on the facing page, but why would I be interested in that? There's another porch off the kitchen facing the side of the house, where Marjorie often received visitors of prepared food on its way into the kitchen. There was a very cool icebox out there, filled by trips to Hawthorne for fresh ice. I will add refrigeration to my list of things to appreciate about the time period in which I live.The house itself is darling, with a kitchen window overlooking the garden and a dining room table overlooking the outhouse (which explains, the Ranger told us, why she always sat at the head of the table, refusing to let anyone else sit there at her dinner parties--she didn't want them to have to eat with a view of the outhouse).
It took years for Marjorie to pull all this together, buying and improving things a little at a time as she sold her work. But she was this close to having to throw in the towel when she sold The Yearling. Oh, she wrote other novels and many stories, but The Yearling won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was made into a movie a few years later, earning her a permanent place in literary history. Only then was she financially comfortable on her farm. And what a beautiful farm it is.
Marjorie certainly wasn't any more perfect than the rest of us. She had a long-time companion named Idella Parker she called "the perfect maid," but theirs was a complicated relationship, despite how much she decried the state of race relations among Southerners. When Zora Neale Hurston visited Cross Creek, she was made to stay in the tenant house with Idella. Marjorie was sued by a friend she made the very day she arrived in Florida, Zelma Cason, for the way she described Zelma's son in one of Marjorie's stories. Her second husband, who owned a hotel in St. Augustine, didn't much care for Cross Creek, and Marjorie didn't much care for his hotel (which is now home to Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum). So they pretty much lived apart half the year and used a place she'd bought at Crescent Beach as their "permanent home." No, she wasn't perfect but she certainly was interesting.
Our tour ended back outside, and we walked around the property a little bit. It really is beautiful. Marjorie lived life a little hard and eventually, it caught up with her. She spent much of the last years of her life at a place she bought in New York where she completed what turned out to be her final novel. She was back in St. Augustine, distraught over the recent death of her editor and friend, Maxwell Perkins, getting ready to start a new book she she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. She left the farm at Cross Creek to the University of Florida to be used as a writer's retreat, but I can't imagine anyone was surprised to find that college students don't take the same care with historic places as other folks, and eventually, it was given to the state and turned into a state park.
Visiting Rawlings' farm made me feel like I was truly getting a taste of something that was uniquely Florida. That might seem odd, considering she wasn't from Florida, but her fondness for native Floridians and their land is reflected in her writings, and visiting the farm made me a part of it.
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