Historic Haile Homestead

The walls of the Haile Homestead, one of Florida’s last antebellum homes, are covered in the thoughts, notes, and general scribbling of the eccentric clan.

Built in 1856 using enslaved laborers, the home sat on the family’s 1,500-acre cotton plantation known as Kanapaha. The plantation successfully operated for decades, before the house and land were left dormant sometime in the 1930’s. It was not until an intrepid movie producer rediscovered the property that the strange contents of the home’s interior were revealed.

It seems that the entire Haile family (Thomas Evans and Serena Chesnut Haile had 15 children) had taken up the odd habit of writing everything and anything on the walls of their home. Nearly every room is covered in doodles, lists, notes, and journals. Altogether over 12,500 words describing recipes, the guest lists of parties, growth charts, domestic inventories, and essentially any other type of record one might think of. The strangest part of all is that no one seems to know for sure why they did it, though docents suggest it was possibly due simply to a lack of paper.

Thanks to a State of Florida grant, the Historic Haile Homestead was refurbished and restored as a historical site in the 1990’s and is currently open to visitors. The wall writings have been preserved in their original state, so any guest who is willing can try to decipher the family’s strange compulsion, though the walls were formally transcribed in 2001.