Lichgate on High Road in Tallahassee, Florida

Lichgate on High Road is a three-acre pocket of oak, garden and woods on the west side of Tallahassee, holding a small Tudor-style cottage and one very large live oak. Visit Tallahassee lists it at 1401 High Road and describes the cottage as built by FSU English professor Laura Jepsen and named for the gates of medieval England. The National Park Service record places it in Leon County, Tallahassee, at 1401 High Rd., under the name Lichgate on High Road.

What makes it odd is where it sits. The Tallahassee Democrat described it in November 2021 as an amazing living sculpture in the middle of a former cow pasture on three acres on High Road, a road that now carries steady traffic. WFSU called it a little plot of unspoiled forest tucked off High Road, only a stone's throw from some of Tallahassee's busier thoroughfares, and a 2017 Democrat column recalled the oak standing in an open pasture on a forested road north of Florida State University before apartments, offices and stores filled in around it.

The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Park Service record gives the National Register Information System number 06000211, the style as Tudor Revival, and the date published as March 31, 2006, with significance in architecture, landscape architecture, social history and literature tied to the Tallahassee property.

Laura Jepsen taught English and literature at Florida State University for four decades. The Tallahassee Democrat reported that she bought the High Road land in the mid-1950s after seeing the oak, and WFSU described her in 2022 as a professor from FSU who stewarded the property in the 1950s and 60s and whose research centered on Shakespeare and English fairy tales. The Park Service record lists 1956 as the significant year and names Jepsen among the architects of the Tallahassee cottage.

She built it to feel old. According to the Democrat, Jepsen wrote that her desires in building Lichgate were to conquer time, to preserve the essence of the past and to escape into reality. In the years between 1956 and 1996 she went to the cottage every day, sleeping in an upstairs loft without air conditioning. Her fireplace was made with stone from the quarry from which the Capitol's steps were carved, a direct link between her High Road retreat and the state buildings downtown, and her floors were 250-year-old boards salvaged from a cabin in Vermont.

Jepsen was also a public figure at FSU in another way. The Democrat reports that after 40 years at FSU, she won a gender discrimination suit against the university for its unequal pay and promotion policy. She wrote a book about the Tallahassee property, also titled Lichgate on High Road, and she lived much of her working life within a short drive of the Florida State campus.

Estimates vary, and the sources say so in different ways. The Tallahassee Democrat called it the 175-year-old tree, the Lichgate Oak, standing like a sculpture in an English garden in the middle of Tallahassee. Visit Tallahassee describes a magnificent live oak dating back to the days of Shakespeare, which would make it far older. No published measurement or core sample was found in the sources reviewed, so the tree's exact age on High Road remains unsettled.

A Leon County yardstick helps with scale. FSU Facilities reports that in 2010 the university inducted eight Southern live oaks on its Tallahassee campus into the Leon County Patriarch Oak Program, which recognizes trees with a diameter at breast height of at least 72 inches, an indicator they are likely more than 160 years old. The sources reviewed do not say whether the Lichgate Oak has been entered in that program. FSU notes that its own patriarch oaks predate the West Florida Seminary, the school that grew into Florida State University, which gives a sense of how long trees of this size have stood in Tallahassee.

The tree's form is the draw. Jepsen, quoted by the Democrat, wrote that the moss-draped live oak swept the ground in every direction, and WFSU's Local Routes series introduced the High Road site in Season 10 as a place with a huge oak tree and an English cottage that the public can enjoy. Visitors to the Tallahassee grounds walk out from the parking area to the open center where the limbs rest on the ground.

A lichgate is a roofed gate at the entrance to an English churchyard. The Tallahassee Democrat explains that Jepsen built an actual lichgate on High Road as an ancient symbol for the transition between the graveyard and the churchyard, and Visit Tallahassee says she named the property for the gates of medieval England. The Park Service record treats the setting as designed landscape, listing landscape architecture among its areas of significance in Leon County.

Visit Tallahassee lists the features: butterfly, perennial and daffodil gardens, a labyrinth and the oak. The Democrat adds the cottage details, a steeply sloped, mossy roof that appears to be thatch, wide-planked clapboards and cross-paned windows, with a small self-designed kitchen inside. Jepsen added the labyrinth for contemplation, according to the paper, and the Tallahassee cottage still holds furniture recovered after her death.

By a close margin. The Tallahassee Democrat reports that Jepsen died on Christmas Eve 1995 and had bequeathed the High Road property to the Nature Conservancy along with $100,000 for its maintenance, her papers and the copyright to her book. The Conservancy considered selling the three acres to developers who by then surrounded the site, according to the paper, and a group of Tallahassee preservationists began a fight in 1996 to keep it intact.

Those preservationists formed the Laura Jepsen Institute for Preservation. The Democrat reports that they managed to obtain a loan and a mortgage and, a year later, acquired the cottage, the labyrinth and the oak, and later bought back furniture that had surfaced in an antique store. The paper reported in 2021 that the mortgage had been paid off two years earlier and that about six regular volunteers handle the mowing, weeding, cleaning and repairs on High Road. Spectrum News 13 reported in 2018 that the property had been on the verge of being lost to apartment development before it was rescued.

Mostly as a quiet open space near the Florida State campus. Visit Tallahassee states that the grounds are open daily from dawn to dusk, with cottage tours offered periodically, and Spectrum News 13 reported in 2018 that Lichgate on High Road is open to the public seven days a week and offers space for events and parties. The Democrat reported in 2021 that entry to the grounds carries no charge, while a modest fee for weddings and events helps pay the bills, and that FSU students can often be found reading or lying beneath the tree.

The oak has also served as a stage. WFSU reported on October 27, 2022 that the Wanderlust on Location theater troupe would perform the Sondheim musical Into the Woods at Lichgate, running November 10 through 13, 2022, with shows at 7 p.m. The director told WFSU the troupe chose the High Road site because of its fairy tale history and Jepsen's work on Shakespeare, a fitting match for a Tallahassee property built by a literature professor to look like an English village.

Upkeep depends on volunteers rather than the City of Tallahassee or Leon County. The Democrat reported in 2021 that the Jepsen Institute welcomes Scouts, fraternities and sororities and anyone willing to help maintain the High Road grounds, and that educational nature programs for schools, scout troops and home schoolers are held under the oak. The WFSU troupe director framed the 2022 production around Jepsen's idea of the place as a sanctuary, the same idea the professor described when she wrote about escaping into the past a few miles from the Capitol.