Historic House Museums in Florida

This impressive home, located on the shores of Lake Eustis, has eighteen rooms and two great hallways. The floors are double heart pine with cypress wood used throughout, Plaster of Paris walls, six fireplaces each with imported Italian tile and beveled glass on the doors and mantels. All the light fixtures, hinges and door knobs are brass. The original copper wire screening is still on all the windows and doors.

The whimsical ambience of Bonnet House is a product of the creative synergy that existed between Frederic and his wife Evelyn and the happiness and comfort they experienced in one another. Though the strictest preservation standards are practiced, the house still feels as if the owners had just stepped out. All the furnishings and ephemera on exhibit are original to the estate.

The house was built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a marine architect and salvage wrecker, and became Ernest Hemingway's home in 1931. The house still contains the furniture that he and his family used. The cats about the home and grounds are descendants of the cats he kept while he lived in the house, including many extra-toed (polydactyls), like the one Papa Hemingway loved.

Guests to Gamble Place can step back in time to experience the same pristine environment that James Gamble found so inviting during his first visit to the area in the late 1800's. James N. Gamble, of the Procter and Gamble Company and a long time winter resident of Daytona Beach, bought this land on Spruce Creek for use as a rural retreat. Included in the estate are a main cracker-style house, orange packing house, life-size replica of Snow White's Cottage, and witch's hut as well as nature trails.

Built in 1843, probably by free black builder George Proctor, the Knott House was first occupied by attorney Thomas Hagner and his wife Catherine Gamble. The house served as temporary Union Headquarters in 1865, where Brigadier General Edward McCook announced the Emancipation Proclamation.