The Knott House: Freedom Read from a Porch
Near Tallahassee, Florida
This white two-story house on Park Avenue has one of the most specific and consequential moments in Florida history tied to its front porch. On May twentieth, eighteen sixty-five, Union Brigadier General Edward McCook stood on these steps and read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled residents of Tallahassee. For the tens of thousands of enslaved people in Florida, the war had been over for weeks. Their freedom had existed on paper for over two years, since Lincoln signed the proclamation in January of eighteen sixty-three. But no Union officer had arrived to make it real. On May twentieth, one finally did.
The date matters. June nineteenth, the day we now call Juneteenth, commemorates the announcement made in Galveston, Texas, a month later. Florida's emancipation moment came first, on May twentieth. Florida has celebrated that date as Emancipation Day ever since, a distinction most Americans outside the state do not know.
The house itself was built in eighteen forty-three and served various purposes before the war. After McCook used it as his headquarters, it passed to William Knott, a state official who served as treasurer and comptroller of Florida in the early twentieth century. His wife Luella was an amateur poet who attached rhyming verses to the furniture throughout the house, which gave the property its popular nickname, the house that rhymes. Many of those poems survive, attached to tables, chairs, and mantlepieces, a kind of domestic literary installation from another era.
When the Knott House opened as a museum in nineteen ninety-two, its curators worked to tell both stories: the parlor-and-poetry world of the Knott family and the larger meaning of what happened on that porch in May of eighteen sixty-five. Each year on the twentieth, the city gathers here for the Emancipation Day ceremony, reading the proclamation again from the same steps where General McCook first made freedom audible in Florida.
