Walking Zora’s Eatonville: The Hurston Trail, Marker by Marker
Joe Clark's store corner, her father's pulpit at Macedonia, the Moseley House, the museum: Eatonville's self-guided heritage trail walks the town Zora Neale Hurston carried into American literature, in about a mile.
3 minute read
Most literary pilgrimages require a car, a map app and a tolerance for disappointment. Eatonville’s fits inside a single street. The town Zora Neale Hurston grew up in — and later rebuilt from memory in some of the greatest American writing of the twentieth century — still stands along Kennedy Boulevard, and Eatonville has marked it: a self-guided trail of numbered heritage markers, placed by the town’s Community Redevelopment Agency, walks you from Joe Clark’s store to her father’s pulpit in about a mile. Do it on foot, slowly. That is the pace the town was built at, and the pace Hurston wrote at.
Start at the library
Begin at the Eatonville Branch of the Orange County Library System, 200 East Kennedy Boulevard. Opened in January 2005, it is a children’s library — material and programming for kids through the sixth grade — that also honors Hurston and functions as the trail’s unofficial trailhead; library staff are used to pointing visitors toward the walking tour, and the branch is the right place to get your bearings before you cross the street. There is a pleasing symmetry in starting a Hurston walk in a room full of children being handed books: in 1901, visiting teachers gave the young Zora books that, by her own account, opened her mind to literature.
The store, the house, the pulpit
The trail’s emotional center is the marker for the Hurston homestead and Joe Clark’s store. The Hurston family’s eight-room house once stood on Peoples Street; directly across the old Apopka Road — Kennedy Boulevard today — sat Clark’s store, the commercial and social heart of the town. Hurston grew up watching the men gather on its porch to swap the tall tales she called “lies,” and she transplanted that porch, and Clark himself — founder, storekeeper, mayor — into fiction as Joe Starks, the ambitious mayor-storekeeper of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and into the folklore of Mules and Men. The buildings are gone. The corner is not, and standing on it with the novel in your head is the closest thing American literature offers to walking into a book.
A few minutes east, the trail reaches Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, organized in 1882 and the town’s largest congregation for much of its history. The Reverend John Hurston — Zora’s father, elected the town’s mayor in 1897 — was called to its pulpit in 1902. The current sanctuary, built in 1994 at Calhoun Street and Kennedy Boulevard, seats a thousand; the older hall beside it carries the name of a former pastor. Our churches feature tells the fuller story of Macedonia and of St. Lawrence A.M.E., the 1881 congregation that predates the town itself.
East end: museum, Moseley House, town hall
Finish the walk at the east end of the boulevard. The Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts anchors the trail with rotating exhibitions by artists of African descent. A short detour south to 11 Taylor Avenue brings you to the Moseley House Museum, built about 1888 and the town’s second-oldest surviving structure — home of Matilda Clark Moseley, Hurston’s closest Eatonville friend, whose parlor Zora visited all her life. Next door stands the Thomas House, the town’s oldest structure and the original site of St. Lawrence A.M.E. Round the walk out at Eatonville Town Hall, where the government those twenty-seven voters created in 1887 still meets. The whole route sits inside the Eatonville Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1998 — find it on the Orlando Top Spots Map and read the Eatonville hub before you go. If you’d rather walk with historians, the Eatonville 1887 Walking Tour runs a guided two-hour version through Eatonville and neighboring Maitland, led by community historians — book ahead, and bring water. Florida is Florida, even in literature.
Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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