Stopped in to visit the Marjorie Rawlings house during the pandemic. What a treat this visit was. I had the place completely to myself.
Visitors to this old Florida homestead can walk back in time to 1930s farm life when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked in the tiny community of Cross Creek.
There was a Fairy Ring that day in her yard...Fairy rings are circular areas of abnormal turf growth that are most commonly found on lawns and golf courses where soils have high levels of organic matter, and in areas where trees have recently been removed. Due to their mysterious, circular appearance, fairy rings have been of interest since ancient times. According to medieval lore, they were thought to appear after a band of fairies had danced in an area.
From Wiki: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name.
Marjorie Rawlings House
Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book.
Outhouse
Marjorie found immense success in 1938 with her novel The Yearling, a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer and his relationship with his father, which she originally intended as a story for young readers. It was released as a film in 1946, and it made her
Her final novel was called The Sojourner and it was published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about the life of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her other, first-born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. To absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York and spent part of each year there until her death.
Definitely worth a trip to visit this homestead.
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