Looking like a well-weathered sign, this was painted just recently on one of the buildings at the Old Jail which will eventually house the Oldest Store collection.

     That weathered look is the artistry of Monty Tris, one of Disney's Imagineers and a designer for major film studios, and now a resident of St. Augustine.

     "It will be a museum," he continues, "complete with period-dressed interpreters, offering pieces of rock candy to visitors and interpreting the various wares offered in the turn of the century store."

     The building is the former Herbie Wiles' "House that Trust Built," moved from US 1 when the insurance agency planned a larger facility there.

 

 

      One in a series of historic features as we prepare for our commemorations, drawn from research by George Gardner 

 

       Cut glass and Tiffany, matchbooks and shaving mugs, Churchill's lion and an Egyptian mummy.
Otto Lightner was a collector of collections, and well-financed by his newspaper acumen and Hobbies Magazine. He couldn't pass up a bargain, like the offerings of cash poor Chicago estates during the Great Depression. 
     "Otto Lightner was a consummate believer that everyone needed a hobby," Lightner Museum Director Bob Harper says. Practicing what he preached, "Lightner was also a consummate collector himself," says Harper.
     Illness - recuperation from lymphatic cancer treatments - brought Otto Lightner to St. Augustine, and to the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where he noticed the Alcazar Hotel across King Street, closed since 1931. He quickly negotiated a $125,000 price, with eager city officials chipping in the remaining $25,000 of Florida East Coast Hotel Co.'s $150,000 asking price.
     The museum opened January 1, 1948, and Lightner promised an endowment "to assure and guarantee its success and perpetuity." But unfortunately, Otto Lightner died in 1950, before reflecting this in his will. The museum, however, was bequeathed to the people of St. Augustine, to be governed by a board of trustees. 
     After nearly two decades of struggling to survive, roof leaks and deterioration led to a 99-year lease with the city for $100,000 in roof repairs and, two years later, in 1969, a $2 million bond issue approved by voters to renovate the Alcazar Hotel and put the museum in order.
     Volunteers rushed forward to organize the thousands of antiques and collectibles and create what many consider "The Smithsonian of the South," with today "between 40,000 and 50,000 antiques and collectibles," Harper says.
     Volunteers continue to serve in the museum, and our Junior Service League, whose energy saved the St. Augustine Lighthouse years back, has taken on restoration of one of the museum's rooms and many of its treasures.
     Our city hall today occupies the front, former hotel section of the building, while the museum occupies the former casino area, including the indoor pool, largest of its kind when completed in the late 1800s.