MUSEUM & CULTURE
John G. Riley House Museum
Leon County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast
An 1890 house at 419 East Jefferson Street, the last building left of a Black neighborhood that once stood around it.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
John Gilmore Riley was born into slavery in Leon County in 1857 and had no formal schooling; an aunt taught him. He began teaching in Wakulla County in 1877, worked with the local Board of Public Instruction from the 1880s until 1926, and was principal of Lincoln Academy from 1892 to 1926, the first secondary school in Tallahassee open to Black students. He bought this land in 1885 for about a hundred and twenty-five dollars and built the two-story frame house around 1890. He died in 1955. The house stood in Smokey Hollow, a settled middle-class Black community that was cleared in the urban renewal of the 1960s; everything else in it went, and this house is what remains. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 1, 1978, restored in 1981, and opened in 1996 as the John G. Riley Center and Museum of African American History and Culture. It opens Tuesday to Thursday and guided tours are given
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