Eatonville's founding was an act of self-determination. In 1887, former slave Joseph C. Clarke and northern philanthropist Lewis Lawrence purchased over a hundred acres from Josiah Eaton, one of the few white landowners willing to sell to African Americans in post-Reconstruction Florida. The 27 Black men who voted to incorporate the town created something unprecedented: a community where African Americans held every office, ran every institution, and answered to no one but themselves. The town's newspaper proclaimed in 1889 that its residents had solved "the great race problem by securing a home in Eatonville, Florida, a Negro city governed by Negroes." Hurston's father, John Hurston, became mayor of Eatonville in 1897, the same year the Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School was founded for vocational education by Professor Russell C. Calhoun, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, but her family moved to Eatonville in 1892 when she was still a toddler. The town became her world. She would later become a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance as a writer, folklorist, and anthropologist, but the rhythms of Eatonville's speech and the texture of its daily life never left her prose. Their Eyes Were Watching God, her masterwork, draws directly from the all-Black community she knew as a child. The novel's porch conversations, its vernacular voice, its portrait of a woman claiming her own life against the expectations of a small town, all carry the DNA of Eatonville. Today the book appears on required reading lists at high schools and colleges across the country.

Established in 1990, the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, known locally as The Hurston, is sponsored by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. The museum focuses on works by artists of African descent, from the United States and from across the African diaspora, rotating its exhibitions quarterly to highlight emerging talent. It has built partnerships with the Orlando Museum of Art and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at nearby Rollins College. Outside its walls, the Zora Neale Hurston Trail threads through Eatonville with 16 historic sites and 10 markers bearing text written by Hurston herself. In January 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center awarded the museum a $50,000 grant to continue its mission.

Every year, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community hosts the Zora Festival, a multi-day celebration of the history, culture, and arts of Eatonville that draws visitors from across the country. Now in its fourth decade, the festival is both a literary pilgrimage and a cultural gathering, connecting Hurston's legacy to contemporary artists and scholars. For a town of fewer than 3,000 people, Eatonville carries outsized significance. It stands as proof that the first generation out of slavery could build not just a town but a tradition, one that produced a literary giant and continues to nurture artistic expression rooted in the African American experience.