Combine History and Faith (Apalachicola)

Historic Home & Garden Tour an Annual Spring Rite

Apalachicola's 17th annual Historic Home & Garden Tour May 1-2, will feature more than a dozen distinctive historic homes, gardens, inns, churches and businesses. The tour is an annual event for Trinity Episcopal Church, one of the state's oldest churches. The tour is expected to attract more than 1,000 visitors.

This year's event will begin Friday evening, May 1, at Trinity Episcopal Church, with an Evensong Service at 5:30 p.m. The service is followed at 6:30 p.m. by a free lecture by Mark Tarmey, a preservation architect, who will present a talk entitled "The Economic Benefits of Historic Preservation". Tarmey is President of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation.

Registration for the tour begins at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 2, 2009 at Trinity Church. Admission the day of the tour is $20; advance tickets are $15. Tickets may be purchased before May 2 by calling Trinity Church (850) 653-9550, or the Apalachicola Bay Chamber of Commerce (850) 653-9419. A gourmet lunch will be available for $10. On the day of the tour ticket holders will receive a brochure which contains brief histories of the homes and a map.

The featured home for this year's tour will be the former home of world-renowned botanist Dr. Alvin Wentworth Chapman, author of Flora of the Southern United States. 2009 commemorates the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Chapman home was recently purchased by Dr. Helen Tudor of New York City. Renovation of the property is underway with plans to devote the first floor to a museum.

In addition to the Chapman house, more than a dozen historic homes and other buildings will be included on the tour. Apalachicola boasts more than 200 residences built in the nineteenth century and more than 100 erected from 1900-1910. In the three decades preceding the Civil War, Apalachicola ranked as the third busiest cotton port on the Gulf Coast behind only Mobile and New Orleans. The prosperity represented by many of the homes on tour is a direct result of this cotton trade.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Apalachicola one of America's "Dozen Distinctive Destinations" in 2008. The Tour is funded, in part, through the Franklin County Tourist Development Council. For more information on additional historic landmarks and visitor sites throughout Franklin County, please visit www.anaturalescape.com.
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