Zora Neale Hurston, a noted author, rented a room in this house in 1942 while teaching part time at the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute and completing her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. The house, one of the few surviving buildings closely linked with her life, is an example of frame Vernacular construction with cool, north-facing porches on both floors, and its owners frequently rented to female students at the nearby institute, now Florida Memorial College in Miami. While living here, Hurston also met novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a St. Augustine resident and author of The Yearling. Earlier, in 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a Chicago medical student, at the St. Johns County Courthouse. She was one of the first to appreciate the significance of Fort Mose north of St. Augustine, the first town settled by free black people in the United States, and her article on Fort Mose appeared in the October, 1927 issue of the Journal of Negro History. During her lifetime, Hurston traveled the back roads of Florida collecting folk stories and songs that she used to write musical plays, short stories, and novels.
