Orman House Historic State Park in Franklin County, Florida

Photograph: Apalachicola Orman House01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Franklin County attraction

Orman House Historic State Park

Franklin County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

An 1838 Greek Revival house built by a cotton merchant, its woodwork cut in New York and shipped down to be put together here.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Thomas Orman built this house in Apalachicola in 1838. He was a cotton merchant, in business from 1834 into the 1880s, and his trade helped make the town one of the main cotton ports on the Gulf. The house is two stories, Greek Revival, and originally held four rooms. Its frame is cypress trunks tied with ships' hawsers and wooden pegs, which tells you what materials a port town had to hand. The finished woodwork, the mantelpieces, the molded plaster cornices and the wide heart-pine floorboards, was made in Syracuse, New York, shipped down and assembled on site. Orman's son William went to Yale, commanded a gunboat in the Civil War, later served in the Florida legislature and helped rebuild Apalachicola afterward. Judge John Fenimore Cooper Griggs bought the house in 1896 and added a front office for his law practice. The state park around it holds the Chapman Botanical Gardens, named for the botanist Dr. Alvan Chapman who lived and worked in this town, and a bronze replica of the Three Servicemen statue from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a veterans memorial

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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