Dudley Farm: A Trip into Florida's Agricultural Past

Story and photos
by Kathleen Walls

Dudley Farm Historical State Park is an authentic 325-acre working “Cracker” farm on the western outskirts of Gainesville. A visit there gives you an accurate picture of North Florida farming through the eyes of three generations of the Dudley family. The farm began in the pioneer days of the 1850s when Phillip B.H. Dudley and his wife, Mary, began the farm. After Phillip’s death, the farm passed it on to his son, Ben, and his wife, Fanny.

Miss Myrtle Dudley, the youngest of their 12 children and the last to remain on the farm, managed a small cattle herd, vegetable, and flower gardens until her death at 94 in January 1996. She kept the farm intact by donating 24 acres to the park service in 1983. The park service later added 232 acres.

The visitor’s center tells the family’s story with artifacts showing the history from early days to the introduction of gasoline-powered equipment around 1945. When I visited there were two musicians dressed in period clothing playing some old-time music with a fiddle and a banjo on the porch.

Another volunteer, Norm Tankersley, tending the commissary and gift shop, told me more about the park. The visitors’ center was a neighboring Cracker house that had been donated to the state park.

The front section contains several other historic buildings. There’s a blacksmith shop and lots of antique farm equipment, horse-drawn plows and a beautifully restores old wagon. There’s a sugar cane mule or horse-drawn mill and a building where the cane was made into syrup. It is still being done today at Cane Day Festival on the 1st Saturday of December, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

There are other learning events as well. Every Wednesday (except the 3rd Wednesday of the month) from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM there is a docent who will teach a variety of domestic skills including quilting, weaving, rug-crocheting, basketry, woodworking, or corn shuck crafts.

When you walk down a trail through a Florida hammock, you see the original farm. Dudley Farm, as it stands today, was the home Ben Dudley, Jr. built in 1880 plus his additions of a general store, kitchen, smokehouse, sweet potato storehouse, dairy and canning house, outhouses, corn crib and barn. Fortunately, he built them from heart of pine lumber, so they withstood time and insects.

The home is a two-story board and batten style with a tin roof. There are dormer windows in the attic rooms. It is furnished with the original furniture much as it was when the Dudley’s owned it. You can only visit the ground floor.

You can sit in a rocker on the porch and rest as you look at the blooming azaleas and other flowers. Or you can walk through the home to the backyard and pump water from the well with a hand pump out back.

The separate kitchen sits directly behind the house. It’s spacious, with both a fireplace and an old wood stove.

The outhouse is set even farther back from the house. I wonder about having to go out there in the dead of night, but I remember seeing chamber pots under the beds inside, so probably no night walks. Other buildings reminded me of all the chores needed to run a farm like this, the corncrib, smokehouse, brooder house, milking room, dairy and canning shed, not to mention feeding and caring for all the livestock.

Walk around the grounds and visit the free-range turkeys and chickens roaming there. Deeper into the grounds you see the Cracker horses and some cattle grazing.