Personal Blog
After Marjorie Kinna Rawlings‘ house, Micanopy, son museum, and River, I made a last stop in downtown Gainesville.
It was really short so I don’t have much to say about it. It was a step for me in my River pilgrimage. I stayed around the Sun Center.
Gainesville is a student city but it was very quiet when I went (Loverboy confirms he went there often for student parties), probably because of the summer vacation. The only place I saw some people was at the Starbuck.
However small Micanopy is, it has its museum. Open everyday from 1 p.m to 4 p.m, entrance is free but a $2 donation is recommended 🙂
Address : 607 NE 1st Ave Micanopy, FL 32667
The inside is just a complete bric-à-brac total, but the volunteer who was there told us the story of the seminole indians (Micanopy was their chief), very interesting.
There was also a little souvenirs shop, with books, DVDs of movies shot there, and so on, and I wanted to buy myself this t-shirt but it was discontinued and there was only some XXL left :-/
After visiting Marjory Kinnan Rawlings’ house in Cross Creek, we went to the Historic Business district of Micanopy. Oh my God this is the cutest town! Time just seems to have been suspended there.
By the way the Huffington Post is in agreement with me.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures as I left my camera in the car, as we had lunch at Coffee and Cream (right door on this picture):
© Coffee and Cream Facebook
In their restroom (so of course I made a donation)
© micanopytown.com
One can see Micanopy in the movie “Cross Creek” (see article about Marjory Kinnan Rawlings) and also in “Doc Hollywood“.
I must say that I had never heard of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings before … I’m certainly not the right person to complete your literary culture so I invite you to visit her wikipedia page. Her life is the most interesting to me. To sum it up, she lived in New York (in the 1910’s), with her husband, where she wrote Gothic romances, the fashionable genre at the time. Difficult to make a name in the flood of novelists writing in the same genre. Craving for fresh air (or on a whim, as you like ^^) she bought a farm in Cross Creek, Florida – hard to find a more remote area – and settled there in the fall of 1928. Her husband, with his bourgeois habits, will not withstand the transition and will leave quickly. Not really a problem for this independent woman. She kept writing her romances, which she continued to submit to her publisher, but he was much more impressed by the letters she included with them, telling about her new life and social interactions in Cross Creek, and he suggested her to write about this. And success finally came, with the publication of two novels before The Yearling (1938) and its Pulitzer.
Yes, that’s what a Pulitzer looks like…
In Danish 🙂
Version reserved to the army
The property is beautiful and extended. When you arrive you’ll go through the citrus grove.
Cross the sharecropper’s house.
Arrive at the barn.
I recommend the guided tour ($ 3, Thursday to Sunday at the times shown above / but not on Thanksgiving or Christmas and not in August and September) to get all the little anecdotes – plus the guides (all women apparently ) are in period dresses.
And finally, the house:
Ingenious 🙂
She actually connected 3 different buildings (rather cool, isn’t it?):
Other views of the house but I don’t show everything, it’s just to make you want visit 😉 :
Yes, there is a motive…
Well I am nice, I’ll tell you, she received flowers when her bathroom was finished (because until then, she had to go outside – to the outhouse), so she put them in the toilet and organized a party to celebrate in her bathroom (she is a bit like my idol right now).
This is a fridge.
Given her distance from everything, someone had to make a detour just to deliver ice.
If you want to know/see more about the lady and her life, you can watch the movie “Cross Creek” from 1983, with Mary Steenburgen, which contains some small mistakes (for example the lampshades put in the wrong way) but is quite close to reality.
Logically, I did not only gain a husband, but a whole new family, including a nephew. Said nephew lives in Alabama, and was the reason for a road trip (twice in a week) to pick him up for a week long Florida vacation. The first time I went to Jacksonville, I took a room in a downtown hotel. I had read the reviews online and most people were indignant about the lack of pool (though it was stated on the hotel page)… this is because in fact, in the South, it is almost mandatory for hotels (and one quickly understands why). I was able to enjoy the pools of the friends’ hotels, and the one of the Super 8 in Troy, Alabama… and I must say that I appreciate quite a lot!
