Florida Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee, Florida

It is the house at 700 North Adams Street in Tallahassee where Florida's governors and their families have lived since the state's first official residence on the site was occupied in 1907.

The Florida Historic Capitol Museum, which operates under the management of the Florida Legislature, notes that the mansion is not among the white office buildings clustered around the tower of the Capitol on its hilltop. Visitors who look for it find gardens close to the bustle of state business, and a house under the shade of live oaks on a site chosen by legislators early in the twentieth century. The museum's online exhibit quotes 700 North Adams Street, a 1997 book from the Florida Governor's Mansion Foundation edited by Mrs. Rhea Chiles, which counted twenty-five governors and their families who had lived in the present house and the one before it.

The same excerpt lists what the Tallahassee grounds have held since 1907: a carriage house and a garage, a chicken coop and a swimming pool. A blackout room was added during World War II, and later a fallout shelter was built during the Cold War.

The neighbor to the north tells the same story from its own collection. The Grove Museum, administered by the Florida Department of State, says the Governor's Mansion sits south of The Grove property, that the State of Florida built the first executive mansion on this site in 1907, and that the old mansion was demolished in 1955.

For about eight decades after Tallahassee became the seat of government in 1824, Florida's governors provided their own housing, often in boarding houses and hotels.

The Historic Capitol Museum exhibit quotes the Florida Metropolis on the problem: a governor paid $3,500 a year had to do the best he could at boarding houses and hotels. Governor Napoleon Broward used the Brown house, built in 1850 on North Monroe Street, as the governor's mansion from his 1905 inauguration until 1907, and the museum notes that the later demolition of that house led to the preservation movement in Tallahassee.

The Legislature acted in 1905, the sixtieth year of statehood, appropriating $25,000 to build an executive residence for the governor. When no suitable public lands were found, George Saxon, a Tallahassee banker, gave the state four lots now addressed as 700 North Adams Street, then at the northern city limits. Henry John Klutho, the architect who had helped Jacksonville rebuild after the fire of 1901, designed the house, and Tallahassee builder Orion C. Parker's crews used horse-drawn lorries to carry the wooden columns to the site.

Klutho's plan was Neoclassical. Twenty-four Ionic columns rose from the front portico floor to the architrave, and a broad gallery surrounded the front and sides. In May of 1907, even though the house was incomplete, Governor and Mrs. Broward hosted a legislative reception in the mansion, and four months later the Broward family moved in. Fifteen families lived in that first mansion on Adams Street; the museum recalls cows grazing on the lawn in the early days, chickens at the rear of the property as late as the 1940s, and neighborhood children roller-skating on the circular driveway.

One fixture from that era remains. After the battleship USS Florida was decommissioned in 1930, the Navy sent its silver to the Tallahassee mansion, where it has remained since 1931, according to the museum.

Decades of wear left the 1907 house in poor repair, and in 1953 the Legislature appropriated $250,000 to build a new mansion in Tallahassee.

The Historic Capitol Museum says Governor Spessard Holland, who left the mansion for his inauguration in January 1941, wrote to a friend comparing the 30-year-old house to a Methodist parsonage on the morning it was treated for termites. In 1949 Governor Fuller Warren labeled it The State Shack. For two years after the 1953 appropriation the location of a new mansion was disputed, until newly elected Governor LeRoy Collins decided to demolish the old house and build the new one on the same Adams Street site. The Grove Museum adds that Collins became Florida's 33rd governor on January 4, 1955, and that his family briefly lived in the original mansion.

The clearing on Adams Street was public. On the evening of July 27, 1955, the furnishings were auctioned off on the front lawn; item number 145, a love seat from a second floor bedroom, sold for $37.50. A Jacksonville wrecking company won the $900 bid to clear the site and dig out the foundation, and by December of 1955 the lot was cleared for construction.

During construction the Collins family moved back to their home, The Grove, which for nearly two years served as Florida's official executive residence. The museum notes that the antebellum house was built in the 1820s by Richard Keith Call, territorial governor and great-grandfather of First Lady Mary Call Collins.

Architect Marion Sims Wyeth was chosen to design the Tallahassee mansion using the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's Tennessee home, as his exterior model.

The Grove Museum credits the first couple: Governor and Mrs. Collins played a significant role in influencing the choice to design the new executive mansion as a nod to the Hermitage. Like the Hermitage, Wyeth's facade is a two-story center section fronted by six Corinthian columns, in place of the 24 Ionic columns of the 1907 house. Inside, the Historic Capitol Museum says Wyeth followed the great homes of the 18th century: the first floor entrance opens to a formal entrance hall with doorways to the reception and dining rooms, the second floor holds the private quarters of the first family, and the basement held laundry, storage and offices. In June of 1956 the Collinses reviewed progress at the site with Tallahassee builder J. O. Carlile.

The furnishing of the Governor's Mansion on Adams Street was entrusted to James Cogar, former curator of Colonial Williamsburg, who worked within an $80,000 budget; the Grove Museum says Mrs. Collins worked with Cogar on the furnishing plan. The museum describes a cut glass and brass Louis XV style chandelier in the state dining room, which by oral tradition was made in 1760, and a Chippendale mahogany long case clock from around 1790 in the entrance hall. The grounds hold live oaks, old camellias and Florida natives such as the sabal palmetto, oak leaf hydrangea and coral honeysuckle. The Grove Museum adds a State Archives photograph of a rare Tallahassee snow on the mansion grounds on February 13, 1958.

The two state museums in Tallahassee give different completion years. The Historic Capitol Museum captions a photograph of the newly finished mansion in 1956, while the Grove Museum says the current mansion was completed in 1957 and shows it shortly after completion in April 1957. Both dates are official, so this page gives both.

Florida law splits the job between an eight-member Governor's Mansion Commission and the Department of Management Services.

Section 272.18 of the Florida Statutes creates the commission within the Department of Management Services: five private citizens appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate, the Secretary of Management Services or a designee, the director of the Division of Recreation and Parks, and a Department of State employee with curatorial and museum expertise. Citizen members serve 4-year terms. The governor's spouse or designated representative is an ex officio member with no vote except to break a tie.

The commission must keep the structure, style and character of the Tallahassee mansion and its grounds consistent with the original plan. The statute names the state rooms as the entrance hall, the state bedroom and its hallway and bath, the reception hall, the Florida Room and the state dining room, and requires a full-time curator to keep a photographic inventory, care for the furnishings and train Governor's Mansion docents.

Under Section 272.185, the Department of Management Services maintains all structures, furnishings, equipment and grounds, except the exterior facades, landscaping, antique furnishings in the private quarters and the state rooms, which follow the commission's directives. The department insures the Adams Street house and its contents through the State Risk Management Trust Fund. The statute's history note begins with chapter 57-61, Laws of Florida.

The key dates run from the Legislature's 1905 appropriation to the new Tallahassee mansion's completion, which state museums place in 1956 or 1957.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the Historic Capitol Museum's Governor's Mansion exhibit, the Grove Museum's Governor's Mansion and Collins history pages, and the 2026 text of Florida Statutes sections 272.18 and 272.185.