lished orchards. Rawlings, smitten, used a small inheritance to buy her
own grove, which came with a primitive cottage and run-down outbuild-
ings a few miles farther south at a hamlet called Cross Creek. Soon, how-
ever, a freeze ruined the orange harvest of her brothers-in-law, and they de-
parted. Her husband, a disaffecting fellow disinclined to prune trees and
mend fences, decamped a while later. Not Marjorie, whose fiction writing
(more so than oranges) came to sustain her. She lived the rest of her life
a Floridian, a countrywoman by preference, and she was buried in at
Island Grove, just down the road from Cross Creek. Her old cottage, barn,
tenant house, duck pen, and yard (now with new orange trees) have be-
come a county-state park. Visitors come by the busload now, so many years
later, to peer into the screened veranda where Marjorie typed letters to
Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
and Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Scribner’s. And here, too, she
composed or rewrote so many stories published inScribner’sand other big-
circulation magazines of the s and s, plusSouth Moon Under(),
her first ‘‘Florida Cracker’’ long fiction; her best-selling memoir,Cross Creek
(); and especially her most beloved novel,The Yearling(), which
was made into an excellent Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie in .^1
The attraction of Cross Creek and especially the vast hammock swamps
nearby was its anachronistic frontierish aspect. The countryside functioned
in the world; it was hard by Henry Flagler’s coastal railroad, after all, and
modern cities, tourist resorts and attractions, and an industrialized agri-
cultural landscape. Yet large sections of northeastern Florida’s interior wet-
lands remained separate and almost independent of modernity, a sort of
living museum of early Anglo-Floridian experience. Alachua County, for
instance, had not yet closed its stock range as late as . Cattle and espe-
cially hogs roamed at large and fed themselves in a still mostly wild country-
side. Marjorie discovered ( just as the first European newcomers had, cen-
turies before) that, as a farmer, she must have good fences around her home
garden and orange grove. Even then, cows broke in or out; worse, the occa-
sional rogue boar wrought havoc with plantings, chickens (which would fly
into trees), and pets. Once Marjorie dispatched one such mean hog with
her trusty gun. The boar belonged to a distant neighbor, a rather menacing
character actually, but Marjorie’s and the neighbor’s artfully indirect (and
quite protracted) negotiations were ultimately successful. Neighborhood
peace was restored—as was Marjorie’s fence.
Beyond her hamlet other people, mostly whites, lived without scores of
cattle and swine, much less oranges, on sandy pine ridges surrounded by al-