Lohman Tin Man and the Sheet Metal Children on the Roof

by Tim Gilmore, 3/15/2024

Long ago, a rooster and a carousel accompanied the Tin Man and the little girl and boy on the seesaw. In the 1950s, before she started elementary school, Lona looked up at them regularly with delight.

“I loved them,” Lona Alligood Hofstad says. “I can remember, after my parents drove past, turning around in the car seat to see them for as long as I could.”

They had been there always, still figures made of sheet metal in a rooftop village of their own. “We moved from the neighborhood in 1962,” she says, “and went back by that building regularly for years.”

She can’t remember the people who did business there, wishes she could. Her father could tell her, but he died 30 years ago. “Back in that time it was all neighborhood businesses and everybody knew everyone. Usually business owners lived in the same neighborhood.” She thinks the owners lived in a house right behind the business.

The rooster is gone. So is the carousel, though part of its assembly remains. The tin man stands crooked, leans sideways and backward beside the chimney. He’s missing an arm. His fedora is rusted. His mouth nearly smiles and he keeps his eyes open, as he has now for most of a century.

The children are two-dimensional. Oxidized and flat. They face each other from their seats on the seesaw, finial in the middle, the girl slightly higher than the boy. Her hair and dress fan out behind her as they have for eight decades.

The old W.J. Lohman Roofing Company Building lies abandoned now, its rolltop corrugated doors unlocked, taupe brick walls overgrown in vines, green and white striped awnings faded over windows on the King Street side.

City directories from the late 1930s through the ’60s say Lohman was “bonded and approved.” Dial telephone number 7-4754 or come down to 281 King Street at McCoys Creek Boulevard, “Roofs Applied, Repaired and Painted, Guttering and Other Sheet Metal Work, A New Roof for Every Purse, You Must Be Satisfied.”

In the early ’40s, photographer Robert Fisher took shots of the intersection of King and Beaver Streets from each direction, streets and longhaul trucks and buses and pedestrians all a dull gray, the billboard across Beaver from Harris Auto Sales pointing a big arrow toward McCoys Creek, not half a mile away, to W.J. Lohman Roofing Co. and promising Federal Housing Administration financing.

The Lohmans were an old Fernandina Beach family, William John, Sr. having run the family dry goods emporium on 2^nd Street there, 40 miles north of Jax, in the late 1880s. Lohman, Jr. and Edna first lived in a small house behind the roofing shop here at McCoys Creek, then moved to MacDuff Avenue in working class Lackawanna, then to one of the more modest houses on Edgewood Avenue in genteel Avondale. When the Reddens took over the business in the ’70s, they kept the name to keep business. The Lohmans knew tragedy and the Reddens ended the company in tragedy, while all along, the sheet metal figures kept watch.

Chip Barr took a sheet metal class at John Gorrie Junior High School in the 1970s. He remembers the carousel being up on the roof here and guesses the figures came from the ’40s. “Sheet metal art was fairly common,” he says. “The materials were cheap and it was a commonly taught skill set. Most junior highs had a sheet metal class and there was an advanced course taught across the street at Tech High.”

From Tech High, which saw its last vocational student in 1979, the Lohman Building stands clear, just across McCoys Creek by the King Street Bridge, the Tin Man visible if you know where to look. The Jacksonville School of Technology opened in 1947 in the two-story white building constructed for industrial training in World War II. When the creek flooded, as it did so often, Tech High students got to school by canoe or rowboat.

Today the Tin Man and seesaw children seem strange, foreign, stranded from another world, and they are, but Tin Men once were common, used as advertisements for sheet metal shops and later for auto repair garages and muffler shops and junkyards. L. Frank Baum wrote of the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz after building a shop-display Tin Man himself. Tin Men and scarecrows both populated the landscape as American archetypes, folk-art cousins to cigar star Indians and blackface lawn jockeys.

The sheet metal figures on the Lohman Building have withstood baking heat, hurricanes and occasional snow. Where the rooster, the carousel and the Tin Man’s arm have gone, who knows? The figures kept watch atop the mourning Lohmans and 70 years later, the grieving Reddens. Their stillness is uncanny.

Lohman, Jr. moved to the bigger city in his and the 20^th century’s mid-30s, separating himself from his German-born father’s dry goods legacy in Fernandina. Then, in ’43, the Japanese Army took the Lohmans’ son Gordon, U.S. Navy machinist’s mate, Prisoner of War, and by December ’45, three months after the war’s end, William and Edna knew Gordon was dead. The Lohmans worked and moved slowly up, 1950s and ’60s, from 287 King Street to 224 McDuff to 1632 Edgewood, and Jerry Redden worked roofs through the ’70s and ’80s and employed his sons and drank beer and smoked and prayed to Jesus. For years, he’d fallen off a roof just once.

Then in 2007, Sharon died — “the most beautiful woman all y’all ever met.” She was just 44 years old, Jerry’s wife for 32 years. She’d been 12 years old when they married. They had seven kids, two in state prison. Jerry fell off another roof in 2012 and had to file disability and his house burnt down in 2014. But the lowest blow was the murder of his daughter Nikki, his youngest, in 2016, and there’s her killer, right beside Jerry in photos from two years earlier, with cigarettes and birthday cake.

On May 1, 2015, Nikki Redden was found stabbed to death on Tradeplex Circle at an industrial compound in the small town of Baldwin, west of Jax. She was 25 years old and had two young daughters. Jerry looked lost, his eyes hard and sad, his mouth missing several teeth. Every day now he did the hardest thing he’d ever done: getting up in the morning, another day knowing his daughter was gone. The morning seemed insurmountable.

Though the case remained unsolved for two years, family members seemed to know something all along. “I don’t want him hurt or anything like that,” Jerry told TV reporters. “I want him to wake up every morning the rest of his life, look in the mirror and know what he done.”

Less than a month later, Jerry made a public appeal to Dennis Mixon: “Dennis, I would be lying if I said I didn’t love you, but you also know how much I love Nikki, so for you to take the life of someone so precious, someone that two little girls who no longer has a mother, a father who no longer has his baby girl and sisters and brothers who no longer have a baby sister, she never was nothing but good to you, same person who helped me 24/7 take care of your mother on her dying bed, so brother, you need to do the right thing and turn your self in. I thought I knew what hurt was, but boy you really showed me a whole new hurt. What you did only a monster could do and that sure as hell wasn’t my brother.”

When police arrested Dennis Mixon in June 2016, a month after Nikki’s death, it was for grand theft auto, not murder. He’d been in prison 11 times since the 1970s. Authorities wouldn’t charge him for Nikki Redden’s murder until April 2018.

These last few years, for the first time since 1937, the shop has lain empty. Wooden stairs without railings climb to the loft. A dirty cloud of opalescent sunlight hovers on an old couch and coffee table surrounded by sets of drawers and curio cabinets. A 2014 calendar advertising Insignia Auto Body Parts shows a car with an open door straddled by a topless woman in leather pants. The top of the calendar curls down and eclipses her head.

Something that looks like the Tin Man’s arm lies at the back edge of the roof. Maybe the sheet metal rooster that long ago wandered away is around here somewhere.

In the late 1970s, Lona Alligood Hofstad took her six year old daughter to see the sheet metal figures she herself had so loved as a child. Once, in 2014, Lona came back to Jax for a visit from her home in North Carolina and drove by to see them. In fact, she’d decided she would buy them to save them, “but,” she says, “there was no business there anymore.” She tried to find out who owned the property, but had no luck.

Now this part of McCoys Creek Boulevard is gone. So is the King Street Bridge, though it’s being rebuilt. Creek banks are being raised on terraced berms to prevent flooding. Streets that once ran into flood zones will now end in landscaped cul-de-sacs like small parks with footbridges. Groundwork Jacksonville, nonprofit partner with the City, is connecting McCoys and Hogans Creeks to the St. Johns River in 30 miles of trails and greenways through 14 historic neighborhoods.

Whether the Tin Man will watch this landscape much longer seems doubtful. For 80 years now, he’s never wavered. For nearly a century, he’s never once averted his eyes.