Walton County Heritage Museum

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The building was a Louisville and Nashville Railroad depot, and the railroad is why DeFuniak Springs exists at all: the line came through, the company laid out a town around the lake, and the Florida Chautauqua assembly followed. The Walton County Heritage Association opened the museum here in 2002 and runs it with volunteers. The collection is county history, gathered locally rather than bought in. The depot sits inside the DeFuniak Springs Historic District, which went on the National Register of Historic Places on August 28, 1992, and that district is the real exhibit: a ring of Victorian houses around a round lake, most of them still lived in. Walk out of the museum and you are on Circle Drive, with the Walton-DeFuniak Library, one of the oldest library buildings in Florida still in use, a short way around the water. For anyone looking at north Walton County rather than the beach, this is the place to understand what the inland half of the county is