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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park

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18700 S. County Road 325
Cross Creek, Florida 32640

(352) 466-3672

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Map of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park
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Front of older home with a screened front porch located at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park.

 Welcome to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park

This year the park will begin celebrating “The Year of The Yearling.”  The Year of The Yearling celebrates the publication of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling in April 1938, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize the following April.  Even after 75 years, this story of a young boy and his pet fawn, as they mature from one spring to the next in the Florida scrub, rings with authenticity and life.  Several programs are being planned from April 2012 to March 2014 to celebrate this 75th anniversary, both at the park and in the Gainesville area.  Details of current events are listed on our Events page  and will be updated frequently.  Click here to see a complete list of upcoming events from Spring 2013 to Spring 2014.  Or just pick up a copy of the book, slip into the Florida wilderness, and then come visit us 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.

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. Picnic facilities and a playground are located in the adjacent county park.