LaVilla: Old Brewster Hospital

by Tim Gilmore, 5/16/2021

1. Walls Talk

When North Florida Land Trust moved into Old Brewster Hospital, the building had been empty, while Jacksonville fought about it and even moved it down the street, for more than 20 years. Not only is the old brick house, its porch decorated with gingerbread scrollwork, one of the few buildings remaining from the prime of this once thriving black district called LaVilla, but it dates close to LaVilla’s onset as its own town after the Civil War. At the top of each of four porch posts, woodwork displays a digit of the year this house was built: 1885.

I love the expression, “if walls could talk,” because they do. They just need a human conduit. Not only does a building like Old Brewster hold stories upon stories from its own experience, as a private residence, as the first black hospital and training school for black nurses in Florida, and as a boarding house through LaVilla’s rise and long fall, but it becomes a Rorschach for the community to fight out its identity and self-worth.

Stories adhere to place. We feel them as genius loci, spirits of the house or land or corner or angle. They speak, but “not all who are called are chosen.” You have to listen carefully. So here we go:

2. Lakeshia’s Story, Part One

She didn’t know the history, nor that the old house had been a hospital. She did not think of these streets as slums. “I thought they lived in a mansion,” says Lakeshia Sutton, a nursing student at Florida State College at Jacksonville. “I’d have to stand on the sidewalk with my head tilted all the way back to see the roof.”

It was 1981 when five year old Lakeshia and her big sister Rhonda went to spend the summer with their Auntie Bonnie and Uncle Jesse, Yvonne “Bonnie” Sparrow and Jesse Paulhill. To one side of the house, a flight of stairs ran up the apartment building next door, another old gingerbread bedizened structure.

On the corner stood Mr. Walker’s grocery where Lakeshia first bought her own candy. She didn’t know Mr. Walker also owned “the mansion” where her aunt and uncle lived. The walk to the grocery with her aunt was short, but it was a pilgrimage.

“I can still hear the sound of the screen door slamming behind me as I went in,” she says. “I remember the sweet smell of pork sausage and bacon being cut and the sound of the freezer paper being torn to wrap the meat.”

Monroe was a one way street and cars sped through the neighborhood from Interstate 95 to downtown offices. Lakeshia and her sister stayed mostly on the expansive front porch, where they played, ate lunch and on especially hot days, raced to finish ice cream or popsicles before their treats melted. The steps to the porch were so steep, Lakeshia says, her five year old legs were tired by the time she got to the top. The front screen door stayed closed, but the heavy wooden door with glass panes behind it stayed open from sunup to sundown.

In her memories, boarders move back and forth behind her in a blur, but she can’t remember them individually. She and her sister weren’t allowed onto the second floor and had to share the downstairs bathroom with first floor tenants. The bathroom, with an ornate clawfoot tub in its center, seemed the size of her aunt’s and uncle’s master bedroom just next door. The doorknobs looked ancient and since they didn’t lock, the rule to knock first was strictly enforced.

Lakeshia and Rhonda slept on the sofa in their aunt’s and uncle’s room. When she closes her eyes, she can still see the dinette. “It consisted of a table and two chairs,” she says. “To the left was a stove, mini fridge and sink. Adjacent to the kitchenette was a half wall with a bed, television, and the small sofa where my sister and I slept. There were many mornings that summer that my sister and I woke up on that sofa to the smell of breakfast cooking.” She says, “There was a door across from the kitchenette that led to the back door. In the mornings after breakfast, my sister and I would sit in the back door and watch the cats play and people leaving for work and wonder where they were going and what they would do there the rest of the day.”

3. Scatmo and Justice Davis

The surveyor was unable to locate Scatmo Reaves in June 1971. Emmet Walker, the owner of B&W Rooming House, said Scatmo was the man, the man who knew, the man to talk to. Scatmo sang with Satchmo, Louis Armstrong himself, on one or more of his tours through LaVilla, when the legendary jazz singer and trumpeter stayed at the Wynn Hotel atop the Lenape Tavern on Ashley Street. It had been almost 60 years since the rooming house was Brewster Hospital, but Eddie “Scatmo” Reaves was old enough. He could tell him about his brother “having his arm set” there. The surveyor asked around, but never found him.

“One of the oldest brick residential structures remaining in LaVilla,” the surveyor typed under “Brief Statement of Significance” on the Historic American Buildings Survey form. “At one time” serving “as the Brewster Hospital and Nurse Training School, the house features a bracketed cornice with incised designs and a unique two story porch fancifully executed by a carpenter, twice incorporating the construction date, 1885.”

The house first belonged to a Danish-born meat merchant named Christian Peters and his wife Ritza. An early business register marvels at Peters’s refrigerator, “conspicuous for its size,” with a capacity for 25,000 pounds of meat, and says Peters served many of the large hotels downtown. An 1886 city directory ad announces, “C. Peters, Wholesale and retail dealer in Northern Beef, Mutton, Veal, Pork, Sausage, Poultry and Game. Stalls 9 and 10, City Market.”

In 1901, after Peters’s death, his family sold the house to the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which ran the Boylan Industrial Home and School. The Boylan School, which would merge in 1932 with Savannah’s Haven Industrial Home and School to form Boylan-Haven School in Jacksonville, had been founded in 1886 and named for Ann Boylan DeGroot, who hoped to atone for the fact that her family owned slaves on its two large plantations. In her 1969 book Six Decades of Service, 1880-1940: The Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Ruth Esther Meeker chronicles the society’s operation of Boylan, Haven, and Mather Academy in New Jersey, to educate former slaves and their descendants.

Harriet Emerson, superintendent of the Boylan School and a cousin of Transcendentalist poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, had decided to find training for several of her students in nursing. At Boylan’s LaVilla campus, she had two cots, a table and some chairs. According to a history given in the 1973 annual report of Methodist Hospital, Inc., “Eighteen girls paid a tuition fee of 50 cents and the first black nurse training school in the state of Florida was formed. Several physicians of Jacksonville volunteered to teach […] Twice a week, instruction was given to mothers and in four months 417 calls were made on the sick.”

Then came the Great Fire of 1901, one of the largest urban fires in American history. It began in LaVilla, three blocks from the school, but spread east of LaVilla quickly and obliterated most of Jacksonville. In the wake of the fire, 75 victims of burns and infectious disease sought treatment at the new school for black nurse training, and as Bettye J. Sessions writes in her 1996 book, the full title of which is A Charge to Keep: Brewster Hospital, Brewster Methodist Hospital, Brewster Hospital of Nursing, Brewster-Duval School of Nursing, “The home and the school became a part of the healing and rebuilding of the city as the fire gave impetus to the work of the Women’s Home Missionary Society in establishing a hospital for its nurse training program.

That’s when Matilda Brewster, widow of Connecticut minister George Brewster, gave $1,500 to start the hospital in Peters’s former home in her deceased husband’s name. Brewster Hospital would operate here only until 1910, move northward to Lee and Union Streets in 1921 and finally Jefferson and Seventh in ’31. The society became the Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church and ran and expanded Brewster at 1640 Jefferson Street in Sugar Hill, where the city’s wealthiest black residents lived, including most of its physicians, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 desegregated Jacksonville’s hospitals.

Sessions notes a draft press release dated May 12, 1966, titled, “A Hospital Dies and Is Re-Born; Brewster Ends—Methodist Hospital Begins.” A June 8, 1966 Jacksonville Journal article headlined “Duval Negro Physicians Have a Problem,” explained the difficulty black physicians formerly employed by segregated black institutions had finding placement at previously all white hospitals.

On September 20^th, The Florida Times-Union wrote that a patient named “Justice Davis of 1512 West 35^th Street said goodbye to Room 367 yesterday [when] a nurse rolled him down the hall and to the front door of Brewster Methodist Hospital. When the door was closed and Davis went home, a final chapter was written in the history of the hospital. He was the last patient to be discharged.”

In 2020, UF Health Jacksonville, which includes in its massive complex the former Methodist Medical Center, celebrates its 150^th year, including Brewster in its history and dating its founding to Duval County Hospital and Asylum at Jessie and Franklin Streets in 1870.

4. The Legacy of Baby Washington

Continuing his Historic American Buildings Survey, the surveyor noted new owners of the old Peters house after Brewster Hospital moved to larger digs. There was Henrietta Barrs and William H. Paling, Herman R. Finn of Commonwealth Realty Co., formerly H.R. Finn Realty Co., an S.J. White and a Joseph S. Diver, then Sidney A. Grovenstein to the Walker family.

The Walkers opened their first LaVilla grocery in 1920, when Emmett Walker was three years old. In the late 1930s, the Walkers moved the grocery to Monroe Street and Emmett later ran both the family grocery and the boarding house.

On February 8, 1998, The Florida Times-Union ran a “Black Voices” column about Emmett, saying, “He now oversees his family’s Monroe Street rental property, which includes the historic Brewster Hospital building and the nurses’ quarters next door.” Emmett’s sister Priscilla Brown and her husband Rayford had retired as teachers before Rayford joined Emmett in running B&W Rooming House. Meanwhile, Priscilla and Rayford opened Brown’s Café together just down Monroe Street.

The photo captures Emmett in rain slicker beneath porch bracket gingerbread seemingly caught in mid-drip, the bright red wall of Old Brewster painted beseechingly behind him. The caption calls Emmett a “retired grocer” standing “on the front porch of the nurses’ quarters his family owns in LaVilla.”

The “nurses’ quarters” refers to the two story Carpenter Gothic boarding house next door at 925 Monroe, frequently called the “companion building” to Brewster Hospital,” built circa 1892, with side bay windows and bay porches and jig- and scroll-sawn wooden porch decorations called both “filigree” and “gingerbread.” The relationship between these two houses and a movement to separate them would launch soon launch a battle royal.

Meanwhile, that surveyor never found Scatmo, who sang with Satchmo, but Bettye J. Sessions found Ms. Dorothy Bacon, the first baby born at Brewster Hospital, in its original location on Monroe Street. Dorothy would have been born at home with the help of a midwife, like most other black babies at the time, because, as she explained in a 1989 letter, “The only babies delivered at the hospital were Caesarian babies.” Dorothy was a C-section baby.

Dorothy’s parents were Grace Davis and Aaron Washington. The physician’s name recorded on her birth certificate is Dr. James Freeman. She wrote that the nurses and hospital workers wanted to name her “after the founder,” but her mother objected. In a postscript she writes, “I was named after I left the hospital. Name on the certificate is Baby Washington.”

5. Vacancies, Lacunae and Dreams Deferred

On Thursday, June 21, 2001, a parole officer found a decomposed body in the building called the Nurses’ Annex. The officer had responded to a burglary call when he noticed hordes of flies coming in and out of a window and a terrible odor. The body had probably belonged to a homeless person, cause of death uncertain.

Sometimes they called it the “nurses’ quarters.” Sometimes people said the old building at 925 held the nursing school beside the hospital. Neither idea could be true. As Alliniece Andino notes in her October 15, 2001 Florida Times-Union story, fire insurance maps from 1897 and 1903 show a different building on the site and a 1913 map shows it a vacant lot.

So 925 Monroe wasn’t there until after Brewster Hospital moved from the old Peters house. Still, the building’s style and construction methods date it to before 1900. “We don’t know when it was moved” city historic planner Joel McEachin told Andino “or where it was moved from.”

Old Brewster Hospital had been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Though it had survived the desperate and crime-ridden 1980s and Mayor Ed Austin’s River City Renaissance plan, which demolished most of 50 blocks of LaVilla in the 1990s, a 2001 proposal by the City of Jacksonville to move it in order to develop the property into a medical office complex threatened its historic protection status.

City Councilman Reggie Fullwood wanted Brewster moved a few blocks north to Ashley Street to stand beside Genovar’s Hall, which had also been the Lenape Tavern and Wynn Hotel where Louis Armstrong stayed, and to designate the area a public park called “The LaVilla Experience.” State preservationists said that Disneyesque idea would be even less historically accurate.

Nevertheless, in 2005, the city moved the oldest building in LaVilla from 915 West Monroe to 843, one block away, and demolished its “companion building,” with its exquisite webbed gingerbread porch trim, one of LaVilla’s last 19^th century buildings. Old Brewster continued to sit empty at its new location.

Then came the showdown, Thursday night, January 14, 2010, at City Hall. City Councilwoman Glorious Johnson demanded the city use the first floor of Old Brewster as a museum celebrating the hospital’s history. The city was planning to lease both floors. It was an albatross on the city’s neck. Accountants had set aside funds for renovating Brewster, but hadn’t included the $200,000 it cost to move the building one block. It eventually cost $2.3 million. City representatives misspoke about how much money was really there.

A Folio Weekly story by Gwynedd Stuart called “Brewster’s Millions,” riffing off the movie title, quoted Johnson as saying, “We will not allow this building to be sold to the highest bidder. I challenge you, urge you, to stop any plans to sell Brewster. I do not pull the race card, but I’m pulling it today. Selling this building would be a slap in the face to the black community.” City representatives reluctantly agreed to change the terms of any leasing proposal.

Diane Melendez, spokeswoman for the Brewster Alumni and Community Nurses Association, said that before past association president Vera Cruse passed away, she’d promised her she’d fight to preserve the hospital’s memory and this building. She said Cruse had asked her why the black community always has to settle for “the crumbs from the plate that everyone else has been feasting on.”

Then in April 2019, the North Florida Land Trust leased the building with plans to share first floor space with the association for a museum. After a year of Covid-19, the museum, allocated to a front parlor room, has yet to materialize, and members of the alumni association, as the years advance, are older and fewer. What happens, Langston Hughes wanted to know, to a dream deferred?

6. Lakeshia’s Story, Part Two: Patterns and Personal Influences

“As I think about the summer I spent in that great big house on Monroe Street,” Lakeshia Sutton says, I can’t help but feel both grateful and sad for how good it was to be a kid there in that time.”

Never mind, for the moment, that city politicians were ardently discussing how they might demolish the entire neighborhood. Or that they’d follow through in another decade, leaving a few buildings, including this one, scattered here and there. Never mind, for the moment, the problems that plagued LaVilla, the crime and poverty, the decay and desperation, from which Lakeshia and Rhonda stayed safe in their aunt’s and uncle’s care.

“Most children of today,” she says, “will never understand the excitement of seeing the sunrise, knowing it was another day you could go outside and play with your new friends, and the disappointment of seeing the streetlights come on, meaning playtime was over.”

It wasn’t long ago that a high school teacher showed Lakeshia’s class old photos of historically significant Black Jacksonville, nor when she found images of Auntie Bonnie’s and Uncle Jesse’s “mansion” at visitjacksonville.com. She knew that porch. And those steps. And the windows. And the strange wooden shapes in the woodwork.

How was her auntie and uncle’s place a “historic monument”? How had she not known that a woman named Brewster donated money for a private hospital and nurse training program there? Even if Brewster Hospital occupied the old house only from 1901 to 1910, before moving elsewhere in LaVilla, how could Lakeshia, a nurse, not have known?

She’d always felt nursing was a calling. Now she thought about that word. “I don’t believe in spirits or anything like that. Now I sit and wonder if my time in Old Brewster’s Hospital had any influence on my decision to become a nurse. I wonder if my ancestors influenced my decision to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves.”

And if Lakeshia doesn’t believe in ghosts, she wonders what concepts might seem similar but make more sense. Isn’t history something like spirits? What about echoes, patterns repeated in a place? Influences? How could influences really be measured or tracked? And what might she, only five years old, have absorbed and experienced in that old place without realizing or understanding it?