Cracker Country

Cracker Country is a living history museum of rural Florida, which was established in 1978 by Mildred and Doyle Carlton Jr. Cracker Country features thirteen original buildings dating from 1870 to 1912 and is set in 1898. The buildings were moved to their present location from throughout the state. The train station is from Okahumpka, and the two-story Carlton house is from Hardee County, Florida. The buildings have been restored and furnished with antiques of the period. Cracker Country is located on the Florida State Fairgrounds in East Lake-Orient Park and is presented by the Florida State Fair Authority.

Buildings and features

General Store

Exterior of the General Store (Rainey Store)

The General Store acts as a gift shop for visitors of Cracker Country, stocking merchandise that references or replicates items that would have been popular in the 1890s Florida town that Cracker Country emulates. Such merchandise includes stick candy, period toys and games, and home décor items. The General Store is located in the Rainey building.

Rainey Building

The original building used as the General Store was built in Ona, Florida, in the 1880s. Ona is one of Hardee County’s oldest settlements. In 1911, a railroad was built through Hardee County, making Ona a major posting, shipping, and receiving point for central and western Florida. The Rainey Building during this time was both a general store and a post office, with a living space on the second floor where the Rainey family raised their four children. The downstairs shops thrived during this boom.

In the 1930s, US-17 was built through Wauchula, and Ona began to fade into obscurity. It continued to serve as a General Store until the 1960s, and by the 1980s it was empty and unused, though still standing. The Rainey building was donated to Cracker Country in 1988 by Reid and Gussie Rainey.

Interior of Terry Store

Terry Store

Originally known as the J.R. Terry Store, the Terry Store was built in the 1800s by the grandfather of Florida’s Governor, Lawton Chiles. Jack Roundtree Terry and his wife, Maude Sparkman Terry bought the store in 1920, and it served as the general store in Fort White, Florida until 1988. In 1992, Terry’s sons, Jimmy and Bill Terry, donated the Terry Store to Cracker Country.

Today, visitors to Cracker Country can wander through the Terry sSore, looking at the collection of period items from the early 1900s, and recreated items from that era, and can talk to the living history re-enactors, who act as shop clerks, about the history of the store and of that time period.

Smith House

The Smith House was originally built to honor the marriage of Daniel H. and Elizabeth Geiger Smith, by their caring friends and neighbors, in 1894, in eastern Pasco County. The house took Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s friends and neighbors three days to build. As all of the lumber used in the construction was harvested from the site, the only extra costs to build the house was for materials from the blacksmith, which cost a total of $15. The house was topped by rot-resistant cedar shingles and originally included a separate kitchen building that is not currently in Cracker Country.

The Smiths raised four sons in the house. The parents would have slept on a cot, which can be seen by visitors of Cracker Country today, and which is original to the house, and their sons would have slept on the floor in front of the fireplace. The Smiths were farmers, and once a year would have gathered their hogs from the woods surrounding their house, to drive them to Tampa to sell. The trip to Tampa would have taken a full day.

In 1945, Elizabeth Smith died, and ten years later, in 1955, her husband, Daniel Smith, followed. The house was donated to Cracker Country in 1979 by the Smiths’ grandson, Willie Smith.

Carlton House

The sitting room of the Carlton House in Cracker Country, featuring a reenactor, knitting.

Built in 1885 by Albert Carlton and Martha Carlton, the Carlton House house was originally located in Hardee County, four miles west of Wauchula. Albert and Martha Carlton raised ten children in the Carlton House, a girl named Ella, and nine boys. The nine boys all shared an upstairs bedroom, and Ella had her own room, upstairs as well. Neither of the children's bedrooms are visible to the visitors of Cracker country. However, the downstairs rooms are visible to visitors, and are fully furnished with belongings that would have been standard in homes of that period. During the Florida State Fair, the home is also the site of several re-enactors who educate interested visitors on the history of the home. The Carlton House was donated to Cracker Country in 1978 by T. Mabry Carlton in order to help found Cracker Country.

Albert and Martha’s eighth son, Doyle E. Carlton, grew up to become Florida’s 25th governor, from 1929 to 1933. Doyle E. Carlton, Jr. worked in the Florida Senate and became Chairman of the Florida State Fair.

Kitchen Garden

The Kitchen Garden is a recreation, on a smaller scale, of the kinds of kitchen gardens maintained by rural Florida settlers, and is currently located behind the Carlton House. Over 100 years ago, it would have taken a garden at least a half an acre large to feed a family of six. The kitchen garden behind the Carlton House in Cracker Country has herbs, old garden roses, heirloom flowers, and heirloom vegetables. Only heirloom plant varieties are grown in the Cracker Country kitchen garden, as they are the same variety of plants that would have been grown in kitchen gardens in the 1890s. Every year, the seeds from the plants are collected and saved for planting the following year’s crops, which helps preserve the older and rarer varieties of plants for the future.

Smoke House

One of the smaller historical edifices available for viewing and interaction with at Cracker Country, this smoke house is an original structure, built in Sumter County in the early 1900s and donated to Cracker Country in 1979 by the Southwest Florida Management District.

Before the age of refrigerators, the smoke house would have helped pioneers to keep their meats fresh and edible for longer periods of time.

Corn Crib Barn

This building was originally located in Bereah, Florida, built sometime in the 1800s. It was donated to Cracker country by an early Florida pioneer family, the Ben Hill Griffin family.

A corn crib barn was a barn built out of cypress logs, and was used by Florida pioneers to protect their corn and livestock. Today, the animal pens are home to Cracker Country’s different breeds of farm animals.

Governor's Inn

Originally built in Lily, Florida in 1912, the Governor's Inn originally functioned as the community post office and general store. The building was donated to Cracker Country in 1983 by Mr. and Mrs. Pat Wilson of Frostproof, Florida.

Currently the Governor's Inn exhibits the first complete collection of oil portraits of Florida’s governors, beginning with Andrew Jackson and ending with Florida’s current governor, Ron DeSantis. It is for this reason that the Governors Inn got its name.

School House

Interior of the School House, featuring animatronic teacher and pupil.

The old school house that can be seen today at Cracker Country was originally built from local heartpine in 1912 in the historical town of Castalia in DeSoto County. It was built on the site of the old log-cabin school house, and served as a school from 1912 to 1932.

In the time when this school house was actively used a school house, school children would have walked to school each day, their lunches in lunch buckets or pails. The youngest pupils would have sat in the front of the room, and the older pupils in the back, with a separation of the sexes, girls on one side of the room and boys on the other. Due to the establishment of the modern public education system in the United States in 1869, public schools began being established across the country wherever there were at least twenty-five students. At least ten students had to be actively enrolled for the school to remain open. Schools in rural Florida in this time period did not go past grade eight. Beginning in 1893, children aged seven to sixteen were required to attend school for at least six months out of the year; children from farm families could not attend school during plowing in the spring and harvesting in the fall, as they were needed to work the farm.

The school house that is currently in Cracker Country was donated in 1890, along with some original furnishings. During the Florida State Fair the school house is home not only to re-enactors, but also an animatronic teacher and animatronic students. The addition of these animatronics in the school house during the week of the Florida State Fair began in 1989.

Church

Aat one time a church, the building actually started off as a one-room schoolhouse. The building was built in the early 1900s in Gretna, Florida, a town that had sprung up as a turpentine town north of Tallahassee where both white and black families were moving to and settling. This building was a schoolhouse for African American children. However, following the decline of turpentine, and then the Great Depression, Gretna slumped. It was reincorporated in 1947, and was converted into a church, since the year before, Gretna’s Holy Ghost Church had burned down. The church was donated to Cracker Country in 1979.

The furnishings in the church are mostly historical artifacts. The benches in the church, for example, are original to the building. There is also a Packard Reed Organ in the church that was originally built in the early 1900s by the Fort Wayne Organ Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana, established in 1871. The organ is made of solid oak, with no veneers, and was donated to Cracker Country by Wayne Warren.

Cemetery

Cemetery

The small cemetery located next to the church is a representation of the standard cemetery from the time of Florida pioneers. The tombstones are not recreations. Rather, they are actual tombstones from an abandoned cemetery near Okahumpka and were moved to Cracker Country for better preservation in 1986.

Okahumpka Train Depot

The Okahumpka Train Depot was originally built in 1898, in Lake County, to serve a section of the Henry B. Plant Railroad system that stretched from Tampa, Florida to Savannah, Georgia. In 1978, the Seaboard Coastline Railroad System donated the train depot to Cracker Country, and since its donation, has been refurbished slightly, with the addition of roof shingles and platform railings.

The Interior of the wooden-sided caboose.

Visitors to Cracker Country today can sit in the original passenger waiting rooms and stand in the same ticket office used by train passengers at the turn of the last century. The freight room, unlike the rest of the depot, does not recreate an accurate freight room from the early 1900s, but instead includes a 500 square foot model train display, that took over 3,000 hours of labor, built by Robert Nelson and Jim Hunter. The model train and its surrounding model town is a recreation of what central Florida would have looked like at the turn of the last century.

Caboose

Standing next to the Okahumpka Train Depot, positioned as if part of a departing train, waiting to be boarded, is a caboose of a wooden-sided train from the Atlantic Coastline Rail. The caboose, numbered 0583, was built in 1917. The caboose houses the train conductor’s office, where he would have ridden the train with the engineer and the flagman. In order to keep an eye on the main body of the train, the flagman would have ridden in a raised cupola in the center of the car, and if he noticed a problem, he would stop the train and walk back a mile up the track in order to place warning markers for any trains that might come behind them.

The caboose contained a coal stove, a table, a water container, a wash basin, bunk beds, tools and spare parts, and a valve for the air brakes.

Murphy Kitchen interior, with antique printing press and reenactor.

The railroad company decided to retire the caboose in 1970, and it was then bought by Dr. James West, a physician, and the mayor of Lakeland. Dr. West used the caboose as an office, outfitting it with electricity before installing a commode, cabinets, and an examining table. In 1978, Dr. West died, and five years later, in 1983, his wife, Ellen West, donated the caboose to Cracker Country.

Murphy Kitchen

Built in the 1800s, in what used to be DeSoto County, the Murphy kitchen was originally part of the childhood home of one of Florida’s senators, Henry Murphy. Senator Murphy is known for the Murphy act, which returned tax liened land to the private sector. The Murphy Act was created during the Great Depression.

The Murphy Kitchen was donated to Cracker Country in 1984 by James and George Murphy. Today, the Murphy Kitchen is home to Cracker Country’s 1900s antique printing press. During the Florida State Fair, visitors can watch the printing press in action, and take home a souvenir Cracker Country Chronicle newspaper, and a Cracker Country postcard, both printed right in front of them. The postcard can then be taken to the Cracker Country Post Office to be stamped with a period accurate stamp.

Interior of the Post Office

Post Office

The Post Office building was originally built in the early 1900s in Cumpressco in the Green Swamp near Webster, Florida. The building was donated to Cracker Country in 1980. The artifacts within the building did not come from the building itself, but were actually donated from various other turn of the century post offices across the state.

During the Florida State Fair a reenactor is posted in the Post Office in order to teach visitors about the history of the building and various artifacts, and to talk to visitors about the history of post offices in Florida. The reenactors were also known to offer to stamp the postcards given to visitors in the Murphy Kitchen, with an official Post Office stamp from the turn of the century, as a souvenir.

Cane Mill

The Cane Mill and eighty gallon syrup kettle was built in the early 1900s, and was donated to Cracker Country in 1979 by Charlie Knight of Hillsborough County.

Prior to being able to purchase syrup and processed sugar from a grocery store, communities relied on cane mills and syrup kettles. Oxen and mules powered the mill to squeeze juice from sugar cane stalks, and afterwards, the juice was collected into the syrup kettle, and boiled until the water had evaporated until what was left was sweet syrup. During the Florida State Fair, visitors can see the cane mill and syrup kettle in action, and even taste the real sugar cane and freshly made syrup produced right in front of them.

Blacksmith Shop

Although the blacksmith shop is not an original building, it is an accurate replica of a 1900s smithy. Cracker Country visitors can see an actual blacksmith at work, creating any number of household items and tools in the same way that blacksmiths of the turn of the last century would have done so.

See also

• History of Florida

External links

• Official website