J Magazine Winter 2017

Clara White Mission, FLORIDA TIMES-UNION ARCHIVES
A curiosity hung in the house is a
plaque with the bell from the yacht
Magic, which won the America’s Cup in
1870. Apparently it came off the Magic
later when it was serviced in the Merrill
shipyard.
But the best single treasure in the
house is a painting of a girls’ school
in Aiken, S.C., that dates to 1845. It is
attributed to miniaturist Henry Bounetheau
or his wife, Julia Du Pré. The society
says it was owned by their son, Henry
Jr., who lived in Jacksonville and, during
the Great Fire of 1901, was determined
to save what he called his “mother’s
painting.” The story is that he died in the
rescue, but the painting survived — albeit
with burn holes you can see today as it
hangs in the Merrill House parlor.
Clara White Museum
The most personal, and perhaps
touching, museum experience in
Jacksonville may be a set of rooms on
the second floor of the venerable Clara
White Mission in LaVilla. The mission
has its roots in the 1880s, when former
slave Clara English White started helping
feed her neighbors from her two-room
house on Clay Street.
She adopted Eartha, the secret child
of a young wealthy white man and his
family’s servant, and the remarkable
mother-daughter team developed into
what has been called the oldest humanitarian
organization in Jacksonville and
probably Florida.
Author Tim Gilmore has written:
“If the goodness, kindness, and mercy
enacted in a particular building, on a
certain quadrant of earth, can accrue
across the years, then the Clara White
Mission should be a pilgrimage site and
613 Ashley Street in LaVilla is sacred
ground.”
Eartha White, who trained and toured
as an opera singer in her youth, returned
to Jacksonville in 1896 and became active
in education, activism and business.
But her lasting contribution was working
with her mother, then alone, through
the Clara White Mission and many other
social-service projects and agencies,
including founding what was then called
the “Colored Old Folks Home,” now a
nursing home.
The work escalated greatly during the
Great Depression, requiring more space,
so Eartha White obtained the old Globe
Theatre Building on Ashley and dedicated
it to the memory of her mother. She
never married and lived frugally in the
second-floor rooms from 1932 until she
died in 1974 at age 97. She lived in the
middle of the swirling work providing
food, housing and social services to the
poor and homeless.
Now those rooms are the Clara White
Museum, which adds another poignant
dimension to Jacksonville history.
Eartha White’s bedroom barely holds
her bed, dresser and a table. She saved
the larger guest room for visiting friends,
which the museum says included the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Booker T.
Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune,
James Weldon Johnson and his brother
John Rosamond Johnson, and Eleanor
Roosevelt.
The museum includes a parlor, a
dining room and the kitchen, which prepared
meals for the poor for more than
40 years until a more modern one was
added downstairs, now serving about
400 meals a day in the mission, which
includes 28 day beds.
You might think the museum’s most
treasured artifact is the organ donated by
a member of Duke Ellington’s band. But
CEO/President Ju’Coby Pittman says it’s
Eartha White’s Bible because, before she
would do business with visitors, she sat
down and read the Bible with them.
The building itself is historic. It began
in 1907 as a hotel, then became a store
and a gambling house before being
turned into the Globe Theatre. The museum
says Jacksonville’s premier architect
Henry Klutho came from retirement
to oversee the renovation of the building
as a personal favor to Eartha White.
If you want to be inspired through a
visit, call the museum weekdays at (904)
354-4162 and ask for Rosa Nicholas.
You’ll have a chance to donate $5 for
museum upkeep.
TREASURES ON THE WAY
Jacksonville Fire Museum
Jacksonville has a very personal relationship
with fire given that the Great Fire of
1901 destroyed the heart of the city, burning
146 city blocks across two miles, destroying
more than 2,368 buildings and leaving
almost 10,000 people homeless.
Built largely with bricks salvaged from
buildings razed by the fire, the Catherine
Street Fire Station opened 10 months after
the fire destroyed the original 1886 structure.
It was the first all-black fire station, with an
engine wagon and two horses on the first
floor and the firefighters’ quarters on the
second, connected by a traditional brass
pole.
The horses were retired as obsolete in
1921, and the firefighting company left seven
years later. The building was used as a repair
shop and storage until it became the Jacksonville
Fire Museum in 1982. It was moved
from Catherine Street to Metropolitan Park
on the riverfront in 1993. The museum was
listed on the National Register of Historic
Places in 1972 and included on the Florida
Black Heritage Trail in 1992.
But it’s not a museum right now. It quietly
shut down in March 2016 after structural
and water damage and lead paint were
discovered. Officials say approximately
$750,000 worth of repairs and restoration
should be finished by April and the museum
reopened by late next summer.
What you’ll see, says the Jacksonville Fire
and Rescue Department, is “an incredible
variety of exhibits and artifacts that depict
the evolution of our city’s fire service from its
beginnings in the 1850s to the introduction
of motorized vehicles in the 1920s, to the creation
of our Rescue Division in the 1960s and
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WINTER 2017-18 | J MAGAZINE 79