Smokey Hollow in Tallahassee, Florida

Smokey Hollow was an African American neighborhood east of downtown Tallahassee, most of it directly southeast of the state Capitol.

The National Register nomination for the Smoky Hollow Historic District, prepared through the Florida Division of Historical Resources, explains that the name, sometimes spelled Smokey Hollow, was a colloquial term used by Tallahassee residents, not the name of a subdivision or legal plat. At its greatest extent, the nomination says, the neighborhood stretched from College Avenue and Lafayette Street, the old St. Augustine Road, south to Madison Street, and from Gadsden Street east to Myers Park on the far side of the Seaboard Railroad tracks, now CSX.

The City of Tallahassee's neighborhood heritage page describes the same place as an African American community of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the area just east of downtown Tallahassee and west of Myers Park Drive. The page credits that description to the Riley museum.

The name came from smoke that settled in the low ground, from wood stoves and a municipal incinerator, along a stream called the St. Augustine Branch east of the Tallahassee Capitol.

The National Register nomination traces the term to at least 1912, when it appeared in the February 26, 1912 issue of the Tallahassee Semi-Weekly True Democrat. It appeared again in the May 13, 1919 issue of the Weekly True Democrat and in a Federal Writers Project piece drafted in 1937. The nomination uses the spelling Smoky; the city, Leon County and Blueprint use Smokey for the neighborhood and its commemoration.

Smokey Hollow was a working Black neighborhood of small frame houses whose population grew most between the 1890s and the 1920s.

The National Register nomination says Black residency varied over time, with the greatest expansion of population from the 1890s through the 1920s. Lafayette Street east of the railroad had several houses and a cluster of frame houses built in the 1910s and 1920s; another part of the neighborhood, with the Church of God, sat two blocks east of the Capitol along Gadsden and Madison streets; and the low streets, Suwannee Street and Franklin Boulevard, were lined with frame homes. Most houses were small vernacular row homes and Craftsman influenced cottages, and the nomination calls the shotgun house an affordable form of laborer housing in Florida.

The neighborhood's most elaborate surviving house belonged to educator John Gilmore Riley on Jefferson Street. The state historical marker for the house, placed in 1997, says Riley became principal of Lincoln Academy, Tallahassee's first local high school for African Americans, in 1893 and served until he retired in 1926. His two-story frame house was built in 1890, sold by the family to the City of Tallahassee in 1973 and placed on the National Register in 1978. The city's heritage page adds that the 1904 Tallahassee City Directory listed five houses on Riley's block, all owned by Black men, and six Black homeowners there in 1919.

Most of Smokey Hollow was cleared for state government growth around the Tallahassee Capitol: a state office complex begun under a 1947 plan, a wider Apalachee Parkway and an urban renewal program.

The National Register nomination lays out the sequence:

The same nomination elsewhere says most of the larger neighborhood was destroyed between 1949 and 1963, when the Capital Center, including the Hayden Burns Building and Apalachee Parkway, was built; its own dates for the Hayden Burns Building (1966 in one passage, by 1963 in another) do not agree. The city's heritage page puts the change in the 1950s, when plans for the Department of Transportation building and the expansion of Apalachee Parkway encroached into the community.

A small eastern remnant survives as the Smoky Hollow Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the Riley House on Jefferson Street in Tallahassee.

The NPGallery record gives the district NRIS number 00001199, a publication date of October 27, 2000, and boundaries roughly along East Lafayette Street, the CSX railroad tracks, Myers Park and Myers Park Lane. The nomination describes it as the last significant remnant of the neighborhood, about five blocks east of the Capitol on high ground beside the public Myers Park. It covers 2.38 acres with 17 contributing resources: 13 residences, 1 church and 3 outbuildings, all one-story frame vernacular buildings.

Those buildings show the housing types of old Smokey Hollow. The nomination counts 7 front-gable buildings, 5 of them shotgun houses and 4 of those built as double shotguns, plus 3 cross-gable houses with L-shaped footprints, 2 nearly square houses with hip roofs and 1 side-gable house. One frame building, built as a church around 1940, served two congregations on alternating Sundays. The houses are private homes, so they are seen from the street.

The main memorial is the Smokey Hollow Commemoration in Cascades Park, which includes the neighborhood's only located commercial building, a restored barbershop.

Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency lists the Smokey Hollow Commemoration among the features of Cascades Park in downtown Tallahassee, a stormwater facility that doubles as an urban park, built by Blueprint 2000 with the City of Tallahassee and Leon County and paid for by the one-cent local option sales tax. A Leon County news release, sent as a county bulletin on March 30, 2018, announced the grand opening of the restored Smokey Hollow Barber Shop on Monday, April 2, at the corner of Franklin Boulevard and East Pensacola Street. The release calls it the only located commercial structure that once stood in Smokey Hollow, moved away as part of the area's mid-century urban renewal program and restored by Blueprint with former residents and community partners.

The commemoration is also part of the city's holiday calendar. The City of Tallahassee holiday events page lists the Holiday Stroll in Cascades Park, 1001 South Gadsden Street, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 12, 2026, with about a dozen acts along the park's trails, including at the Smokey Hollow Commemoration.

The city has added its own markers of memory nearby. Its neighborhood heritage page says the City of Tallahassee dedicated a park adjacent to Smokey Hollow on September 20, 2022, honoring Althemese Pemberton Barnes, who founded the John Gilmore Riley Center and Museum in January 1996. The same page offers the FAMU Way Historical Survey, produced by Florida A&M University history faculty from residents' accounts for the FAMU Way project.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rereading the Smoky Hollow Historic District nomination and NPGallery record, the Riley House marker, the city neighborhood heritage and holiday events pages, the Blueprint Cascades Park page and the Leon County barbershop release and bulletin.