Fort Clinch

Just to confuse my shiny, geometrically patterned Art Deco dreams, yesterday we went to one of our local coastal forts. Fort Clinch was begun in 1847 and never really finished, part of a 2nd tier series of fortifications built by Congress. It was used in the Civil War and WWII but never saw much action. On the first weekend of every month it's populated by men who talk about the place like they live, eat and work there and do not know the world from which visitors come. You think they're a little cracked in the head, but it's okay. It's fun, and their characters do seem to know about point-and-shoot cameras.

The guy who kept the outdoor fire going was heating and straightening bent window pulleys just like ours, and over the fire in the very hot kitchen was a cauldron of bean and chicken stew. Most of the structures were reasonably cool despite it being 90+ degrees in the open sunlight. On staff yesterday were the jailer, pharmacist/doctor, guards, and cooks.

Shiny, gold!

This is the new light in the dining room. Labor was about 5 hours, doing touch-up paint on scratches, re-wiring (although I skipped re-wiring the little twist knob at the bottom), finding a plate to hang it from, and then hanging. And some more touch-up.

The gold paint was mixed from craft store liquid acrylic leftover from a medieval icon project in college. It has a metallic sheen. The light has 4-5 different shades of gold and amber, so I mixed in raw sienna and raw umber canvas paint to make the colors. It took an hour of patient mixing and painting in thin layers to match chipped and scratched areas to the lovely original brass, green and coppery color. Even though the original finish held up to a soft toothbrush and water, when I tried to gently flake off acrylic errors the first finish came with it in specks, exposing tiny bits of clean aluminum underneath. There was no going back. Then it was covered with two coats of Zinsser spray shellac with a yellowish tinge. The tinge was helpful because the acrylic paint touch-ups didn't have the same translucence of the original "brass" paint. I think there is no finish as beautiful as the aged original; it makes me angry to see the "Professionally Refinished" fixtures on Ebay covered in swaths of solid, bright colors that, at least on fixtures like mine, are nothing like the original, subtle polychroming.

There are companies online that carry replacement porcelain sockets and cloth-covered wire, like Sundial Wire and Savta, but I decided to try Lowe's first. Surprisingly they had the exact same porcelain sockets, and without the hard-wiring, but with a different bracket. Lowe's also had replacement candelabra sockets, for vintage wall sconcery. They didn't have the fake wax candles made of paper for the candelabra (just a note for my future project) or the cloth wire, but I went ahead and bought zip cord and twisted it into a similar look. One of the bulbs is an appliance bulb for now. The existing fan support -which was only attatched to the ceiling plaster, not to the box!- is now attatched to a new multi-use plate which is sandwiched between the light fixture's support and two metal rectangles included with the plate. I removed most of the chain after realizing that chaining it to a hook above the dining table (off-center in the room) looked silly.



Pretty!

Goodbye, 80's Ceiling Fans!

That is, to electric ceiling fans, not to people who are fans of 80's ceilings.
J and I have had little time together lately, but his last show closed on Saturday so we decided to go out on Sunday afternoon. The idea was to walk around Jacksonville's Five Points neighborhood, where our old apartment was, but smoke from the Georgia fires just north had turned the sky the color of peach yogurt. You couldn't see the opposite banks of the river. So we went to Fans and Stoves, a Points antique store instead. While I was looking for an eggbeater and vintage glass bowls for my sister, I saw 3 shelves of old glass bottles. I thought, I have tons of those under the house! but to the right was this light:


I've been after this light for months but never wanted to pay the bidding price. Of the cast and painted designs that pop up on ebay, this one seems the least ornate. Hopefully a future Ralph's House owner might give this one a chance, as opposed to a fixture thickly covered with scrolling flowers, cut-outs, straps and Spanish shields. I wouldn't want to eat below one of those for fear stuff might be falling into the food. Ew!
So now we've set a type of lighting for the house and can start to acquire more fixtures based on this style. What a relief.

House Owner History

The first owner of our house was N.F. Merck, either Noble Frank or Frank Noble. In 1927, he and his wife Marion lived with Horace Merck in the Springfield neighborhood, in Apt. 5 of a building on Main St. next to N.F.'s pharmacy, "Merck Drug Co." My mom, a nurse, became very excited when I told her about Frank, or Noble, but I don't think there is a connection to Merck & Co., (of Vioxx fame) which patented its name a decade before "Merck Drug Co." opened shop in Springfield. Merck owned this house for 5 years. His wife became a saleswoman for a drugstore chain, Lane Drug Co., at neighborhood store #76. It's possible that the Mercks left Springfield so Marion's commute would be shorter, while N.F. probably drove across town. (Maybe he parked his car in the garage footprint!) Merck Drug Co. moved downtown in the 1930s to what appears to be the block of buildings torn down two years ago to build the new main library and contemporary art museum, by Hemming Plaza. Interestingly, the 1927 directory listing for Merck Drug Co. advertised their slogan as "Drugs with a Reputation", which was then the slogan for Walgreen's Drugstores. I found a photo from 1947, four years before the drugstore ended, and the sign does say Merck Drug Co. All of Mr. Merck's previous residences are now parking lots, and in the 1940's he was just a post office box.

The house has since had many residents:

1934 - Vasco and Ethel Geiger, Vasco was a clerk.

1938-1955 - John H. Webb and wife Miriam. John started in lumber, and moved into poultry. He appears to have had the longest ownership.

1956 -1967 - A series of renters. The Webbs no longer live in Jacksonville. There is a different renter in the house every year for at least 12 years, many in the Navy, one a florist, one a stevedore, one who worked for local grocer Winn Dixie.

1968-1991 - The library closed before I could continue in the directories and indexes. Jason says if I keep this up, I'll open a portal to the underworld.

1992-2005 - Agnes Hogan. I'm not sure how long Agnes actually lived here; by the incoming junk mail there have been many renters in the past few years but Ms. Hogan's name has been on the property taxes as owner AND resident. Probably not legally. The house was purchased from her trust by Mr. Hazouri, the flipper. There is a small handful of infamous Hazouris in Jacksonville, one a mayor in the early 90s. I remember my mom snagged him in a parking lot after his speech at a US Navy event to shake hands and voice an opinion. His keepers looked nervous. My hair was unclean and I was skipping school. But I digress.

The first owner next door, in 1929, was JC Rawlins, a cashier for Cudahy Packaging Co.

Also, in the 1800s this southern part of the neighborhood was a cotton plantation.

There are still many more leads to follow, especially with the Merck Drug Store. Was he a black sheep in the American Merck family to be living in this small house, barely incorporated into the city, or a distant relative, or was he unrelated? It's all very interesting, and I haven't dug into any city-owned paperwork like tax or business records yet.