www.HawthorneFlorida.org

click on the mural for a full view
Mural by Harimandir Khalsa of Melrose, FL
Commissioned by, and located at M&S Bank, Hawthorne branch

click here for the  Hawthorne Historical Museum and Cultural Center

Follow the Trail to Hawthorne, Florida
By Virginia Seacrist

Our country is swelling with a generation longing for their good ol' days. Surprisingly in Florida, the nation's fastest growing state, we can still find a few small towns Garrison Keeler might use for material, characterizations of small town USA, southern style. Hawthorne, a town time passed by, traps all the charm of a pioneer Florida town; yet, it still functions without the gild of a tourist town. If you long for the smell of a feed store and remember how the town shakes and comes to a standstill when the train comes through, visit the real old Florida town of Hawthorne.

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Hawthorne is one of the many towns radiating like spokes from culturally enhanced Gainesville, the hub of Alachua County, home of the University of Florida Florida Gators.  Choose a bright, sunny autumn day and set out via bike on the Gainesville to Hawthorne Rails to Trails. Peddling the 15 miles may be too much in one day for some folks, so an alternative is to drive the newly four laned State Road 20 to Lockloosa Trail Head, park and peddle or walk the two miles into Hawthorne. If the parking lot is empty, you'll see the black donut circles and twin snake-like tracks of teenagers performing their right of passage with their hot rods, made by modern country boys unlike Robert Frost's, whom he hoped were bending the birches for a swing because they live too far from town for baseball.

On this autumn day, blooming yellow daisies may be sprinkled among green Palmetto fans, which front the planted pines. You may be alone on the paved bike/hike trail, or you may hear an occasional "Passing left," as an athletic biker slides by in his helmet and skintight biking outfit. Leaving the woods and entering town, you may hear the Hawthorne Hornet's High School band practicing, accompanied by a cow's moo from the working farm next door, and you may see the small town's hope and weekend's entertainment, the high school football team, practicing as you pass the high school.

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Leave the Hawthorne Trail and wander the five or six residential streets. Small, mostly unpretentious homes span 150 years and sit on lots large enough for an in-town vegetable garden. Children may be riding bikes or tossing a ball in the street, without fear of being hit by a car. Hawthorne is the way it was when we were young...almost.

The people who live in Hawthorne may becoming aware of that they live with nostalgic  treasures, but newcomers from a more-congested South Florida recognize the value of the working small town and have begun to preserve it. Turn onto Johnson Street, the two-lane highway that used to be US 301. Although this former North/South route carried heavy commercial and tourist traffic, you can safely ride your bicycle on the main street today. Luckily or unluckily, the reconstructed main highway by- passed Hawthorne. Ten gas stations used to serve the traffic. An old timer stated that they had so many gas stations "They almost had to sell gas to each other." Mom and Pop and family businesses still dominate Hawthorne's main street. Small, one story Ocala block stores have grassy space between them; one features a sign saying "I don't dial 911" and "This house guarded by a shotgun." 

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This sign typifies one side of the conservative attitude, but walk into Joe McMeekin's Feed Store to hear how a contemporary remembers his daddy's stories of walking into Florida from Georgia and how it was in the '20s. You might even be lucky enough to run into Harry Evans, an old timer who knew the area's most famous writer, Marjorie Rawlings, author of The Yearling, which immortalized Florida Cracker life in pioneer Florida. Rawling's unceremonious grave lies not far away in Antioch Cemetery. The same shopkeeper, whom you may find passing time with another Cracker sitting in a straight wooden chair on the bare floor, can tell you about the converted Bingo Hall on the other side of the highway which had been one of two packing sheds for forkhooks. "Forkhooks, moss, and turpentine" and the highway fueled Hawthorne's economy before box stores and imported vegetables.

Locals gathered the lithe, grey Spanish moss, which hangs like a symbol for antebellum Southern life from all the Live Oak trees, dried it, removing the grey "bark," leaving a cushiony black fiber used for stuffing furniture and automobile seats before synthetic foam rubber. "The little creek over yonder was the mill where my daddy carried the corn to be ground into grits." Given encouragement, Frank Stokes might tell you that above the acoustic tiled ceiling of the Feed Store, remain the original cypress beams, and you can still see the lighter wood pine slats around the store window. But, inside today's Feed Store, you can still buy a leash for your dog or feed for your cattle. Sets of onions and packs of tomatoes provide a changing evergreen display under the front window.

The store manager's eyes light up if you warn him that he's better watch out, because the place is so charming, it might be turned into a tourist town. He mentions Citra and some of the other by-passed Florida towns are already preserving their old courthouse and throws in that Hawthorne and Citra used to have one-cell jails not too long ago, before the County took over.

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Jane Segal is a recent implant into Hawthorne who recognizes its historic value. She is credited with much of the historical preservation, pointing proudly to the old church being restored. Constructed of lighter wood slats and yellow pine floors, this 1800s Black church is painstakingly being taken apart and re-built, ridding it of damaging termites. Volunteer workers moved the church and rubbed the old brick piers clean with bottle caps nailed into wooden blocks. The church will be Hawthorne's historic museum, complete with the saved pains of red and yellow colored glass. Hawthorne was part of the Underground Railroad and a center where plantation owners gave slaves land.

Another newer church up Johnson Street shelters the oldest gravestones in town. Worn almost smooth by Florida's summer showers, tombstones display dates as early as 1826 with wrenching records of infant fatality, "daughter 15 days old," and testimonies to loving husbands, wives, and mothers.

Another renovated site is the City Hall, sitting under the town water tower. The original courthouse burned, but this 1920s version of white stucco and the original old bell in its tower add charm and authenticity to this quaint Florida anachronism.

Hawthorne is a town where one may well know the name of the pharmacist who might have gone to school with her son, as Adam Clark did with mine. This local who didn't move away recommends, along with everyone else in Hawthorne, that you dine in The Chicken Factory, where you can eat "lizards and gizzards...I mean gizzards and livers...over rice." If you long to preserve local cuisine in lieu of chain restaurants, drop in before you takeyour leisurely bike ride across Paynes Prairie to Gainesville. Listen for the train whistle as you separate from the good ol' days and wander back to the future.