Goodwood Museum & Gardens

Goodwood Museum & Gardens sits on Miccosukee Road on land that has been continuously shaped by human hands since 1834, when the Croom family of North Carolina bought roughly 2,400 acres and built a cotton and corn plantation worked by enslaved people. That plantation era origin is not something the museum glosses over. Its own materials walk visitors through the property’s full timeline, including the 1857 purchase by merchant Arvah Hopkins, who expanded the holdings to about 8,000 acres worked by more than 200 enslaved laborers, a history that is central to understanding antebellum Tallahassee and Leon County’s plantation economy as a whole.

The story shifts after the Civil War. Ownership changed hands twice between 1885 and 1911, and by 1911 a wealthy northeastern arrival named Fanny Tiers had purchased Goodwood and, in the museum’s own words, transformed it from a landscape of labor into a landscape of leisure. From 1925 to 1948 the property passed to Senator William C. Hodges and later to Thomas M. Hood and Margaret Hodges, who used the grounds as a social and political gathering spot, the kind of place where mid century Tallahassee’s political class actually met and mingled. After Margaret’s death in 1978, Thomas Hood began planning a restoration with an explicit goal in mind, turning Goodwood into a museum and greenspace that would serve the wider Tallahassee community rather than a single private family.

Today the Main House, now around 190 years old, anchors a campus with gardens and grounds open most days of the week. Grounds hours run Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with the gardens closed Sundays. Guided house tours run on a set schedule Tuesday through Friday at 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., and 2:30 p.m., with Saturday tours at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. General admission is $12, with a $10 rate for veterans, seniors, and students with ID, and $6 for children ages 6 to 12. Groups of ten or more pay $8 per person, and members get in free, which matters for anyone planning a repeat visit during a semester at FSU or FAMU.

As a locally governed nonprofit rather than a state run historic site, Goodwood relies on admission revenue, memberships, and event rentals, including weddings and private gatherings held on the grounds, to keep the Main House and gardens maintained year round. That gives it a different feel than the state operated house museums closer to downtown. Staff lead the tours themselves, the gift shop sells items tied directly to the property’s own history, and the calendar includes community programming built around both the arts and the site’s complicated plantation past. For anyone researching Tallahassee’s arts and history scene beyond the capitol building, Goodwood is one of the few places where the full arc of that history, from plantation economy through Gilded Age leisure through modern community museum, is presented on one piece of land you can actually walk across in an afternoon.