Planning is now underway for the Annual "Historic Apalachicola Home & Garden Tour" sponsored by Trinity Episcopal Church. Today Carrie Kienzle and Nita Morgan, co-chairpersons of the event, announced that the tour is expected to attract more than 1,000 visitors to Apalachicola, Florida on Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2, 2009.

This year’s event will begin Friday evening, May 1, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 79 6th Street, with Evensong at 5:30 p.m. Following the service, at 6:30 p.m., Mark Tarmey, an experienced preservation architect, will present a free lecture entitled “The Economic Benefits of Historic Preservation”. Tarmey is President of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation and is currently involved in several preservation projects through the 4M Design Group which he heads.

Registration for the tour begins at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 2, 2009 at Trinity Church. Admission the day of the tour is $20; advance tickets are $15. Tickets may be purchased before May 2 by calling Trinity Church (850) 653-9550, or the Chamber of Commerce (850) 653-9419. A gourmet lunch will be available for $10. On the day of the tour ticket holders will receive a brochure which contains brief histories of the homes and a map.

The featured home for this year’s tour will be the former home of world-renowned botanist Dr. Alvin Wentworth Chapman, author of Flora of the Southern United States. 2009 commemorates the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Chapman home was recently purchased by Dr. Helen Tudor of New York City. Renovation of the property is underway with plans to devote the first floor to a museum.

In addition to the Chapman house, more than a dozen historic homes and other buildings will be included on the tour. Apalachicola boasts more than 200 residences built in the nineteenth century and more than 100 erected from 1900-1910. In the three decades preceding the Civil War, Apalachicola ranked as the third busiest cotton port on the Gulf Coast behind only Mobile and New Orleans. The prosperity represented by many of the homes on tour is a direct result of this cotton trade.

Participants in the 2009 Historic Apalachicola Home & Garden Tour will readily understand why the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Apalachicola one of America’s “Dozen Distinctive Destinations” in 2008.