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Lanier House318 Lake Grove Rd.
This house was built in 1908 and occupied by three generations of Laniers.
The Laniers have been producing tupelo honey for over 100 years from the swamps along the Chipola and the Apalachicola rivers. The Apalachicola River valley is the only place in the world tupelo honey, made exclusively from the white tupelo and sought after for its taste and clarity, is produced commercially. Pure tupelo honey, unlike other honey, never granulates and may even be safely eaten by many diabetics. The tupelo season is short—2 or 3 weeks in the spring—and it success dependent on many factors, natural and human.
Lavernor Laveon Lanier, Sr., apprenticed with a local beekeeper and borrowed $500 in 1896 to purchase his first hives. He was also a pharmacist who reportedly tended his bee hives in a shirt and bow tie. L.L. Sr. was a widower with teenage children when he met and married school teacher Kate May Jones from South Carolina. Their son L.L. Lanier, Jr., was born in this house in 1923. Click on the photos below to view some historic photos of the Laniers and their tupelo honey business
In the 1950s, L.L., Jr., with the help of his wife Martha, also a school teacher, began bottling honey and placing advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post and other national magazines. In 1991, L.L. retired from the honey business and turned it over to his son Ben and Ben’s wife Glynnis.
In the spring of 1996, award winning film director Victor Nunez bought a jar of tupelo honey from the Lanier’s stand in Wewahitchka. He drove to the Lanier House and asked Ben and Gynnis if they would help him with a film he wanted to make about a beekeeper. Ben served as a consultant on the resulting Ulee’s Gold, starring Peter Fonda as the beekeeper. Gynnis, L.L., and Martha were cast as extras, and all the bee yards and swamps shown in the film belong to the Laniers. Today you can still buy tupelo honey from the side porch of this nearly 100-year-old house on Lake Grove Road.
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