The Laura (Riding) Jackson Home — Vero Beach, Florida

Laura (Riding) Jackson was a poet, critic and student of language who spent the last half of her life in a small frame house in Wabasso, north of Vero Beach. The Florida Department of State historical marker placed at the house in 2020 records that she was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City in 1901, studied at Cornell University and, writing as Laura Riding, became a renowned author during the 1920s and 1930s. Her home is now preserved on the Mueller Campus of Indian River State College at 6155 College Lane, Vero Beach.

Her literary career began far from Indian River County. The Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation describes her as the only female member of the southern literary group known as the Fugitives, whose members included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. She moved to Europe to work with the English poet Robert Graves, and the two founded the Seizin Press in London in 1927 before settling in Deia, on Mallorca. The marker credits her with 27 books of poetry, short stories, criticism and social commentary produced abroad.

The Foundation's list of major works runs from The Close Chaplet (Hogarth Press, 1926) and A Survey of Modernist Poetry, written with Graves, through Collected Poems (1938) and the late prose book The Telling (1972). Many of those titles were reissued long after she had settled in Wabasso, which is why the Vero Beach house draws visitors interested in modernist poetry as well as local history.

She returned to the United States in 1939 and, according to the state marker, gave up poetry for a comprehensive study of language. In 1941 she married Schuyler Jackson, the Time magazine poetry critic, who joined that work. The marker says the couple settled in Wabasso in 1943 and restored a small frame home that stood on an 11-acre citrus grove; the Foundation describes the property as 13 acres of citrus groves. A 2018 Vero News report placed the house among the groves west of the railroad tracks in Wabasso.

The Wabasso grove paid the bills. The Foundation says the Jacksons raised citrus organically and shipped it to Northern markets to support work on an unprecedented dictionary in which each word would have only one definition, a project that grew into a study of the nature and function of language. Schuyler Jackson died in 1968. Laura completed the project before her death on September 2, 1991, and Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words was published in 1997 by University Press of Virginia.

Life in the Wabasso house stayed spare. The Foundation's historic home page notes that until 1989 she lived there without electricity, using kerosene for heat and light and propane for cooking. Laura and Schuyler Jackson are buried at Winter Beach Cemetery, entered from 69th Street; the Foundation's grave site page notes that the cemetery is privately owned and asks that visits be scheduled with its management.

The state marker calls the Jackson home an excellent example of Florida cracker architecture. Built of Florida pine circa 1910, it has raised floors, a metal roof, deep porches and large windows set for cross-ventilation, features meant to keep a house livable in the Wabasso heat before air conditioning. The Foundation adds that the center portion, also of Florida pine, is the oldest part of the house and is distinctive in its simplicity, and that the Jacksons added the north bedroom and bathroom and installed indoor plumbing.

Vero News called it in 2018 one of the few local examples of true Florida Cracker architecture still standing in Indian River County, and the Foundation says the home is registered as a Friends of the Library USA National Literary Landmark and listed on the Florida Literary Map. A pole barn moved with the house now serves as an open-air gathering space beside it on the Mueller Campus.

The house has moved twice. After her death in 1991, supporters formed a nonprofit to save it, and on August 9, 1994 it was moved to the Environmental Learning Center on the Wabasso Causeway, according to the Foundation. A Vero News report from March 1, 2018 said the house stood on an acre leased from the center for $2,100 a year, and that the center's expansion plans did not include it. The same report noted that in May 2017 the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Wabasso house among the most threatened historic properties in the state.

Indian River State College offered a new site. The college's Board of Trustees unanimously approved the agreement on Nov. 27, 2018, placing the house on the west side of the Mueller campus behind the Brackett Library, Vero News reported. The house was cut into sections, and the first loads left on three tractor trailers in early summer 2019 for an 11.6-mile trip west on the Wabasso Causeway, across U.S. 1 onto CR 510, south on 58th Avenue and 66th Avenue, across State Road 60 and east on College Lane, as Vero News described on July 11, 2019. The Foundation dates the final move to July 14, 2019.

The reassembled house reopened with a ribbon cutting on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2020, timed to her birthday, according to a Vero News notice. By August 2021 the paper reported that the house and pole barn had become part of campus life near 66th Avenue and State Road 60, with students from the neighboring Indian River Charter High School training as docents.

The house opens on a winter schedule. For the 2026-2027 season the Foundation lists hours from 1 to 4 p.m. on the second Sunday of each month from Nov. 8, 2026 through Apr. 11, 2027, and every Tuesday from Nov. 10, 2026; it is closed May through October. A $5 per person donation is suggested, groups of eight or fewer can drop in, and larger groups reserve tours in advance. The grounds on College Lane are open from sunrise to sundown, and signs with QR codes explain the house when it is closed.

Behind the house is a Florida-friendly garden with pine flats, a children's sensory garden, a word garden and a resident gopher tortoise, and a path links it to the Brackett Library on the Mueller Campus. The Foundation's Writing Center, its office for workshops and writing groups, is at 1914 14th Avenue in downtown Vero Beach, according to its home page.

The Foundation calls itself the literary heart of Indian River County since 1992. Its stated mission is to preserve the author's Wabasso home and to nurture writers of all ages through writing groups, summer camps, workshops and poetry festivals. Programs listed in 2026 include teen writing workshops, the Write in the Middle summer camp, Teens Listen and a range of adult writing groups that meet at the Vero Beach Writing Center.

The Foundation's signature fundraiser is the annual Poetry and Barbeque festival at the house each spring, and its 30th anniversary was marked on January 19, 2023 with an evening featuring Florida author Carl Hiaasen at the Community Church of Vero Beach. Those events keep the Laura (Riding) Jackson name in circulation in a county where she lived quietly in a Wabasso grove for nearly five decades.