Researching A Historic Home

One of my favorite closing gifts for a client who just purchased a historic home in Jacksonville was a sweet booklet of their home’s history. They were so thankful of this thoughtful gift and can’t wait to start making their own memories in their lovely new home.

I love learning about history. I’ve visited over 50 National Parks and Historic Sites, and hundreds of museums all over the country. I studied history at Rutgers University and later at the University of Florida during my graduate work. I dedicated most of my career to working with museums, cultural institutions, and historic preservation. Research feels like settling in with a comfy blanket and hot cup of tea — it feels like home.

What better way to use my self-proclaimed history-nerd status in my real estate career than to deep dive into the history of a client’s home? It is not as daunting as it may seem. I have a few easy steps to set you on your way to learning more about your home, too!

Where to Start?

Is your home a contributing structure to a National Historic District? If so, the City of Jacksonville, as well as the State of Florida, will have what is called a Florida Master Site File (FMSF) on your home. The FMSF often includes a lot of the basics about your home, including the year it was constructed, the architect and builder, and the important architectural features. Jacksonville’s residential areas on the National Register of Historic Places are Durkee Gardens, Old Ortega, Riverside/Avondale, Springfield, and Downtown.

On the website for the Historic Preservation Section at the City of Jacksonville, you can find lists of contributing structures by address for Riverside/Avondale and Springfield. You can also call their office to see if they can provide access to a site file in any of Jacksonville’s National Historic Districts. Riverside Avondale Preservation has many of their site files scanned and they have a vertical file on almost every home in the district, which sometimes contains more than just the site file. The Springfield Improvement Association & Archives actually has the site files for that district scanned and available for online access, which makes research so much easier!

Next Steps!

Visit the Special Collections at Jacksonville Public Library downtown for some deep diving into research. This is where things get fun! One really great resource is the Sanborn Insurance Maps, which you can find online in several places. However, there is nothing like leafing through the huge old books and the secrets they hold in person. The image to the right is just a small section of one of the largest books you will ever behold. They have to place the book in a cradle in order for you to use it.

The Sanborn Maps were maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining property hazards and they are a treasure trove of information. They show the size, shape, stories, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and the uniform nature of them showed changes of the buildings over time. If you shine a light through the back of a page like the one to the right, you can see alterations to the buildings directly pasted on top of the map. I felt like a history spy from National Treasure when I learned that secret!

The downtown library also holds old City Directories where you can search by address, find the name of the person living there, then search by name, and often find all the people living in the household and their occupations. Be aware! Some addresses have changed over time. So, pay attention to the cross streets when you are doing your address search in a city directory!

The library also has various newspapers on file where more prominent buildings were listed under the building construction activity sections. These newspapers have their own directories which can help you narrow down your search before you hop on the microfilm machine and start zooming away.

Additional City Rescues

On the City Property Appraiser’s website, search for your home address, then scroll down the page to the Sales History section. Find the most recent transfer of the property and click the book/page number link. You will be directed to an image of the deed located on the COJ Clerk of Courts website. Within each deed is Property Description that references a Book and Page number for the historic City of Jacksonville Plat Maps (see image top left for an example).

Now, visit the Clerk of Court website and search by Book/Page. In the example above, I would search for Book 2, Page 4. Then click on the Plat Map results and voila, winner, winner chicken dinner - you now have a copy of the plat map for your neighborhood. For this particular home, you would look for Block 80, Lot 5. That is where the historic property is located. I also had a nice print of this plat map framed for my client as another special closing gift.

Another avenue at the city that is a little more daunting than others is researching your building permit and plans, if they exist. These are located in the building department. Call their offices first to make an appointment. This takes a lot of time going through microfilm to locate and there may be nothing at all to find, so it is all about patience.

Ancestry.com

Finally, and this is not accessible for everyone, but if you do have an Ancestry.com account, that is a really great way to find out even more information about the people who lived in your home. You can do a reverse search with an address by year. Again, make sure you have the right address because they did change over time in many cases.

For this example, I found the correct address in the City Directories by looking at the cross streets. Then I searched the historic address in Ancestry.com and found the 1910 and 1920 census records, which listed every household member, their age, where they were born, where their parents were born, their occupation, relation to the head of household, and more. This is the 1920 census which shoes that eleven people lived in this home in Springfield. ELEVEN! There was a man and his wife, his three children, one son-in-law, three grandchildren, and his sister in law and her son. This is a 2032 sf house! Some couples want a house that big to themselves these days!

I hope this information was helpful to you. If you start your journey in historic research and get stuck, reach out to me! I would love to help and get nerdy about history with you.

Jax Film History Part 2: Florida's First Studio

In Part 1 of this series, I provided an overview of how and why Jacksonville was the Winter Film Capitol of the World and was a precursor to Hollywood. The first film company to discover Jacksonville and set up shop here was Kalem Company. The studio was founded in New York and named after its founders George Kleine, Samuel Long, and Frank J. Marion. Cold winters, poor weather, and dangerous indoor lighting of the era meant that filming could only occur regularly during certain months of the year.

Kalem’s scout was sent south to search for a winter studio where they could film year round. They stopped in our bustling City in 1907 and quickly wrote back home that they should look no further for a winter film location. Kalem Company immediately set out to open a studio in Jacksonville, making them the first film producer to open a permanent set location outside of the Northeast.

Soon after Kalem ventured south, other producers also began to leave behind cold winters for sunshine and varied landscape. In these early years, most of those companies came south just to film in the winter months. Our first snowbirds! Kalem’s company is notable for being the first motion picture company to remain in Jacksonville throughout the year.

Kalem set up shop in the three story Roseland Hotel which was located on three riverfront acres around the current location of the abandoned Ford Factory (Tallyrand and Clarkson Streets). The Roseland Hotel was one of the first regular tourist hotels in Jacksonville after the Great Fire of 1901. The advertised the ability to accommodate 100 people, had private rooms with hot and cold water, electric lights and call bells. There was a tennis court, croquet grounds, a river dock, and a bowling alley on site.

Kalem moved a whole company to the location. The team included Director Sidney Olcott, Cinematographer George Hollister, Scenic Artist Allen Farnham, and property man Arthur Clough. Kalem’s star actress was Gene Gauntier. She made strides for women in the film industry by also becoming their most productive screenwriter. She also chose locations, supervised sets, and even co-directed many of the films. Gauntier was part of a small group of actors that played different roles in the films made here. Some of the other actors included Jack J. Clark, who was married to Gene Gauntier for a spell, Robert Vignola who played the bad guy, J.P. McGowan, Alice Hollister, and Ethel Eastcourt.

The Diver, Kalem Company, March 1911

I found this old silent film documentary by Kalem entitled “The Diver” which focuses on a shipwreck being blown up with dynamite on the St. Johns River. It is pretty cool because you get to see an authentic diver getting outfitted in period gear and then submerging into the water to set up the dynamite under the shipwreck. It makes you wonder how many shipwrecks they had in our beautiful river back in the day because they look like they knew what they were doing!

It didn’t take long for Kalem to outgrow the boarding house. He constructed a huge studio nearby where he installed a $20,000 lighting system, a glass ceiling, an indoor stage and a 54’x40’ outdoor stage where they would film two movies a week.

In 1908, Kalem produced eighteen 1-reelers called “The Sunny South Series.” The first film was A Florida Feud (aka Love in the Everglades) about a couple in love but dealing with a feud between their families. It was an instant national success, yet, locals were angered by the negative depiction of southerners within Kalem’s first films. It sort of reminds me of Florida Man jokes. It seems it has always been easy to make fun of the south.

Kalem’s third winter in Jacksonville was also the 50th anniversary of the Civil War. Veterans throughout the country were organizing reunions and raising more Civil War monuments than any other time in history. Filmmakers took advantage of the anniversary hubbub and began shooting a ton of Civil War flicks. Kalem even purchased cannons and stored them at the Roseland Hotel for use on their historic-themed films.

A few of Kalem’s Civil War movies can be found online, and if you decide to watch them you will notice that the cards are written in Dutch. This is interesting to me because it shows the international distribution of American films produced in Jacksonville. If curious, check out By a Woman's Wit, The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg and Darling of the C.S.A. Oh, and The Confederate Ironclad which stars Miriam Cooper who would end up landing a staring role in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (a movie I was forced to watch in my college film class). Cooper wrote a memoir where she told stories about her baby pet alligator that she adopted while living in Jacksonville, which is just so DUVAL to me.

Kalem was sold to Vitagraph Studios in 1917 and by that time they had moved much of their productions to California. I have too many other stories to tell before I talk about the downfall of the film industry in Jacksonville. Stay tuned for the next installment, which will focus on all of the film studies located at Dixieland Amusement Park, one of which had 160 trained animals they used in films, including elephants, tigers, and camels, oh my!

Jax Film History Part 1: Introduction

When you think of filmmaking in Jacksonville…. WAIT - Do you think of film making in Jacksonville? Most of us do not. Maybe because it has been quite a while since we’ve had a major motion picture filmed here. That is mostly due to the State of Florida no longer offering incentives to film companies, so they moved their business to adjacent states that do provide incentives, like Georgia. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Jacksonville hosted major Hollywood flicks and celebrities, like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, Kevin Spacey in Recount, and John Travolta in Lonely Hearts and Basic (funny story — my mother-in-law was Nurse #1 in that film). Awesome as it was to have these films made in Jacksonville, they were a late addition to a fascinating and complex history of how Jacksonville could have been Hollywood!

Creature of the Black Lagoon life-size model on display at Museum of Science and History, Jacksonville, Florida. The REEL Hollywood: Jacksonville's Film History

Creature of the Black Lagoon life-size model, The REEL Hollywood: Jacksonville’s Film History, Museum of Science and History, Jacksonville, Florida.

In 2016, I was asked to guest curate an exhibit at the Museum of Science and History entitled The REEL Hollywood: Jacksonville’s Film History. I love research, so it was a blast to deep dive into Jacksonville’s rich and sordid history with the film industry, interview people involved with film, and to coordinate with multiple archival institutions and private collectors in order to build out the exhibit. One private collector loaned us a life-size model of Creature from the Black Lagoon! How cool is that?

Did you know that movies were made in Jacksonville before they were in Hollywood? In 1908, Jacksonville hosted its first film production, while the first movie wasn’t made in Hollywood until 1911. In fact, more films were produced in Jacksonville between 1912 and 1914 than in Hollywood, hundreds of them! And the first Technicolor film, The Gulf Between (1917), was produced in Jacksonville out of a modified Pullman train car outfitted with a lab and darkroom. I can just imagine what Jacksonville might have been like at this time, actors arriving in droves for the opportunity to become a star while filmmakers and camera men shot silents on our city streets.

 

“This venture (to Jacksonville) was almost epoch-making, establishing as it did new artistic standards, particularly in atmosphere and inaugurating the custom of traveling far and wide in search of effective and authentic backgrounds. … Our departure created a sensation in the industry.” ~Gene Gauntier, actor and screenwriter

 
Silent film set in Jacksonville, Florida, Florida Memory

Silent Film Set in Jacksonville, Florida Memory

Why did film producers choose Jacksonville? The silent film industry began in New York and Chicago in the 1890s. At that time, filmmakers depended on natural light to make films, but the rainy, cold and cloudy weather often shut down film production during the winter months. As the demand for more films increased, companies were forced to film inside studios. However, the indoor lighting needed to capture moving images was often dangerous. It easily started fires and could even explode. So, motion picture production companies started looking for outdoor locations to film in the winter months.

While the Selig Polyscope Company filmed A Trip to Jacksonville in their travel series in 1906, Kalem Production was the first to open a studio in Jacksonville in 1907 (Part 2 of this story will focus on Kalem Studios). Soon, the height of the film industry was upon the River City, dubbed the “Winter Film Capital of the World.” Sandy beaches, rivers, swamps, jungles, and bustling city backdrops made for an amazing variety of film locations.

Thirty firms would locate to Jacksonville, including Metro Pictures (later MGM), and Fox Film Corp (later 20th Century Fox). Between 1909 and 1926, over 300 films were produced in our city. Companies hired over 1,000 actors who made Jacksonville their winter homes. Actors such as Oliver “Babe” Hardy, Billy West, and Lionel and Ethel Barrymore began their celebrated careers in Jacksonville.

Want to watch a silent film made in Jacksonville in 1916?

Check out Bouncing Baby at Florida Memory

Why Jacksonville?  It was the Southeast’s largest city, with over 57,000 residents. It was a major hub for rail and ocean liners, conveniently connecting it to the Northeast and making it easy to transport people and equipment. In addition to favorable weather and a variety in the landscape, Jacksonville offered inexpensive real estate to set up shop. It also had the talent and political support needed for the industry to blossom.

Why isn’t Jacksonville still the movie capital of the world? I plan to share more about the rise and fall of Jacksonville’s film industry in future stories, including how cars driving off the docks into the St. Johns River and a subsequent Mayoral election signaled the beginning of the end for movie making in Jax. The next story is about the first studio to set up shop in Jacksonville: Kalem Production. Florida Memory has some amazing photos from Kalem’s Jacksonville studio that I can’t wait to share with you!