Historical Resources

Beadel House

The two-story frame house at Tall Timbers, in Leon County, Florida near Tallahassee, represents an important period in Panhandle history. The house was developed and used when vast areas that had been plantations were occupied by Northerners who hunted quail.

The original section of the house was built around 1895 by Edward Beadel, a New York architect who was independently wealthy and who came south every winter to hunt. He had purchased the land from the owners of a larger estate in the Florida Red Hills, Live Oak Plantation, and had named the estate Tall Timbers.

Its second owner, Henry Beadel (Edward’s nephew), was a naturalist and philanthropist who left his entire estate to be used as an ecological research station. He was one of the pioneers in the use of fire as a land management tool for quail propagation, and also was a noted nature photographer. The upstairs rooms of the house he and his uncle Edward lived in are now used as administrative offices. The rooms in the lower part of the room have been restored with period furnishings, photos and artifacts to reflect the lives of the Beadels. Interpretive exhibits in several of the rooms provide visitors with a sense of life on a hunting plantation.

Henry had visited Leon County every winter until 1919, when he purchased Tall Timbers from his uncle Edward and became a permanent resident of Florida. The younger Beadel added a one-story, five-bay wing to the east of the older building in 1921, retaind the pleasant vernacular colonial revival style and linked the two buildings with an eighty-six-foot-long porch framed with square posts, wooden balustrade, and wisteria trellis. A three-bay dormer was constructed in the old shingled roof to add more bedroom space.

The original two-story section is a rectangular building with a gabled roof that was probably designed by Edward Beadel and built for $3,000 by a Thomasville contractor. There are four rooms on each floor, which is divided by a central hall and joined by a U-shaped staircase to the rear.

Painted yellow with white trim, like the main house, the 1921 addition has a master bedroom, bathroom, and a large living room/study. The main house was modernized when it became offices for the Research Station, although the wainscoting in its rooms and halls had been preserved. The addition has been kept as it was when Henry Beadel lived in it from 1921 to 1963. The living room/study is a museum that contains books, photographic equipment, and tools used for research and collecting by Henry Beadel. The room is paneled in brown sweet gum wood. Heavy oak beams support its twelve-foot-high ceiling. A sevenfoot-wide fireplace dominates the north wall of the thirty-sixby-forty-foot room, and mounted fish and beehives hang from the walls.

The house is set on brick piers with cinder-block infill on a slope facing Lake Iamonia, screened by live oaks and magnolias. A 1890s photo shows it with a huge front lawn, landscaped with native grasses and framed by pines and hardwood trees. Photos from early in the twentieth century show the house with a picket fence, planted flowers, a vegetable garden, and imported palm trees. Today, an open vista with minimal plantings is maintained at the house. The economy that produced the residence, first a plantation and later a hunting preserve is gone. But the house stands as a reminder of those days.