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Ximenez-Fatio House Museum is one of the best-preserved and most authentic Second Spanish Period (1783-1821) residential buildings in St. Augustine, Florida. In 1973, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark in 2012. The museum complex sits just south of the city's central Plaza de la Constitución at 20 Aviles Street (formerly Hospital Street), the oldest archaeologically documented street in the continental United States.〔 It is located at the center of Old Town, the city's oldest continuously occupied community. Since 1939, the property has been privately owned and managed by The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in The State of Florida (NSCDA-FL). Through their efforts, it was restored and interpreted to reflect its function as a fashionable boarding house during Florida's first tourist boom, which began after 1821. The property is a historic house museum, furnished and presented to tell stories of the visitors who lodged there, the women who owned and managed it, and how people lived during Florida's territorial period. == Historical background and context == The two-story main house was built by Andres Ximenez (an alternate spelling of Jimenez), a merchant of Spanish birth who married Juana Pellicer, daughter of Francisco Pellicer, a leader of the Minorcan community in St. Augustine.〔 The property's modern name references Ximenez as well as the last historic owner of record: Louisa Fatio (FAY-she-oh), who ran the boarding house as Miss Fatio's. Louisa purchased the house in 1855, becoming the last of three successive women owners during its years as a boarding house. Their success contributes to the historical significance of the property, because this was a time when few American women owned property in their own names or managed a respectable business.〔 The house's adaptability to commercial activities is due in part to its size and central location near the plaza and the bayfront. Andres Ximenez built the structure to accommodate his family upstairs and support them through undertakings housed downstairs. His wife Juana probably assisted him in running a general store, tavern, billiard table and lottery.〔 The Ximenez family did not occupy the house for long. By 1806, both parents and two of their five minor children had died. For a number of years following, Juana's father managed the property on his grandchildren's behalf.〔 The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, in which Spain settled a border dispute and ceded Florida to the United States, brought big changes to St. Augustine. The only city on the Florida peninsula, it became a destination for curiosity-seekers and consumptives on doctors' orders to escape cold northern winters. The presence of Castillo de San Marcos, a coquina fort built by the Spanish and now controlled by the U.S. military and renamed Fort Marion, brought a larger military presence to town. A decade after Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, the need for more and better visitor accommodations became pressing. Local residents began advertising rooms for rent with board (meals) included. This kind of lodging was in most cases a step above staying at a hotel. While small-scale boarding houses were the norm, the times were favorable for a more ambitious approach. In 1830, Margaret Cook completed the process of purchasing the Ximenez House from its heirs.〔 Cook had relocated to St. Augustine from Charleston with her second husband Samuel in 1821. A widow again by 1830, she had the freedom not routinely granted to married women of her day to transact business in her own name. She secured these rights through legal documents signed by her husband before his death. Architect Herschel Shepard verified that the house was converted to add extra bedrooms during Cook's ownership. Cook hired Eliza Whitehurst — a widowed friend from Charleston who may have also been a close relative — and opened the house to boarders.〔''Florida Herald,'' St. Augustine, November 18, 1829, E.B. Gould, publisher. Available at St Augustine Historical Society Research Library, Microfilm File Cabinet - Drawer 11 Reels 2-6.〕 Under Eliza's management, "Mrs. Whitehurst's boarding house' developed a reputation for high standards and good food. One guest noted, "…we were very fortunate in getting board at Mrs. Whitehurst's, considered the best in town." In 1835, 23 guests were recorded as having stayed at the house, with the majority coming from the northeast.〔 Eliza Whitehurst succumbed to illness in 1838, as did Margaret Cook's daughter. That year, Cook sold the boarding house to Sarah Petty Anderson for $4,000.〔 She also sold Anderson an adjacent piece of property that she had purchased at auction the year before.〔St. Johns County Deed Book N, p. 28.〕 This piece of land measured 57 ½ feet along Green Street (now Cadiz) to the west of the boarding house.〔St. Johns County Deed Book N, p. 220.〕 Anderson and her husband George were among the many newcomers to Florida in the early 1820s. Anderson's mother, Frances Kerr, had purchased 450 acres of land west of the Tomoka River in 1818 for a plantation known as the Ferry. In Kerr's will dated September 2, 1820, Anderson and her husband were named the heirs of the Ferry plantation. 〔 East Florida Papers, will of Frances Kerr, Bundle 318Q3 - Reel 145, St. Augustine Historical Society.〕 In 1829, the Andersons bought Mount Oswald, a 1,900-acre plantation at the junction of the Halifax and Tomoka rivers.〔St. Johns County, Deed Book H, p. 329.〕 They later bought a third plantation, which was burned during the Second Seminole War. The ruins of this Dunlawton Plantation and Sugar Mill still stand on Nova Road, west of Port Orange, Florida. The site was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1973.〔 By the end of the 1830s, Anderson was a widow living in St. Augustine. In the early 1840s, she hired Louisa Fatio to manage the Ximenez House as a boarding house. She retained Fatio as manager until 1855. That year, Fatio purchased the house for $3,000.〔 Louisa Fatio was the granddaughter of Francis Philip Fatio, Sr., co-founder and later sole owner of the 10,000-acre New Switzerland plantation on the St. Johns River west of St. Augustine, as well as two other large properties in North Florida.〔 She was highly educated for a woman of her time. In 1812, the family's plantation house was attacked and partially burned during the East Florida Patriot War. After they rebuilt between 1822 and 1824, Louisa — who never married — helped her frail stepmother run the household.〔 The New Switzerland plantation was torched a second time during the Second Seminole War, which began in 1835. In 1836, Fatio moved to St. Augustine. The city was filled with military personnel and refugees from the war, and she found work managing boarding houses with her sister Eliza. Fatio's reputation for fine food and accommodations grew. First-hand accounts, such as Charles Lanman's Adventures in the Wilds of the United States, note her reputation as a hostess: "From personal experience I can speak of one…of these establishments kept by Miss Fatio, a most estimable and popular lady; and if the others are as home-like and comfortable as this, the ancient city may well be proud of her houses for the accommodation of travelers and invalids."〔 Under Fatio's management, the house on Aviles Street became known as Miss Fatio's. The establishment was a fixture in St. Augustine until her death in 1875. The Fatio House is a setting in Constance Fenimore Woolson's fictional story about visitors to St. Augustine. Titled "The Ancient City," it was published in two parts by ''Harper's New Monthly Magazine'' in 1874 and 1875.〔 Sometime after 1855, Fatio added a second floor of bedrooms above the one-story wing on the north end of the main house. For years, experts thought the addition was completed during Margaret Cook's ownership in the 1830s. The theory was overturned in 2009, when dendrochronology experts from the University of Florida and the University of Tennessee dated the wood in the framing of the upper-floor wing to the latter half of the 1850s.〔 Eugenia Price made Louisa Fatio a major character in her 1980 novel, ''Margaret's Story'', the third volume in Price's "Florida Trilogy." One of its settings is Fatio's boarding house in St. Augustine. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ximenez-Fatio House」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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