MUSEUM & CULTURE
DeSoto County Historical Society Museum
DeSoto County · Central Florida
The county museum is the John Morgan Ingraham House, a Florida Cracker home of the late 1800s brought back after Hurricane Charley.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The DeSoto County Historical Society keeps its museum at 300 North Monroe Avenue in Arcadia, in the John Morgan Ingraham House. Robert Early Whidden, a cattleman and businessman, built the house in the late 1800s. John Morgan Ingraham bought it in 1919 and lived in it until he died in 1980 at the age of 96, having served in the Florida Legislature from 1945 to 1949 and attended President Truman's dedication of Everglades National Park in 1947. The house is built in the Florida Cracker manner, with high ceilings and doors and windows placed to pull air through, and it has kept its original details: a double-backed fireplace, a two-hole outhouse and a pitcher pump on the shelf outside the kitchen door. Volunteers began restoring it in 2002. Hurricane Charley tore it up badly in 2004, and grants from the state's Division of Historic Resources and from a company foundation paid for the repair over the following years. Inside are period furniture, Ingraham family belongings and local history displays. The society also runs a research library in a replica of the Ingraham Seed House nearby, holding photographs and documents. The museum opens Thursdays and the second and fourth Saturdays from 9 in the morning until 1, and closes for June, July and August
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