Oldest House in the Oldest City in the US

[Music] we are here in the ancient city of saint augustine florida i have with me charles tingley we're going to be talking about the oldest house in saint augustine florida thank you charles for coming along and telling us about this tell us about whose house this was well thank you very much mr townsend um this house is called the gonzalez alvarez house after two of the families that lived here the longest tomas gonzalez hernandez came here from the canary islands in the early 1720s and he married a local girl um maria francesca de guevara now her family had lived in saint augustine for about a hundred years up to that time and they get married in 1723 and um we think this property may have been part of her dowry because her family owned the adjacent properties as well so she had cousins nearby but many people know this as the oldest house and many people get confused with that label because it is not the oldest house in the united states it's merely the oldest house in the state of florida we're in the courtyard of the house this was actually part of the house complex and this is our well this is our water well and everyone has one and that made saint augustine a very healthy town because it's not like all the townspeople had to go to a centralized well that if it became contaminated everybody would get sick and we say it was a courtyard because right behind where you are perpendicular to the surviving house was the kitchen and washroom which uh disappeared almost 100 years ago so we've walked into this sort of enclosed porch this available outdoor space and these are very important in spanish houses because uh you have to remember that the interior of houses uh could be very dark you didn't want to be lighting expensive candles to see what you were doing so an outdoor space in our mild semi-tropical climate is very advantageous even in some old spanish inventories this space is referred to as the comidor which literally means dining room uh so you would have your meals alfresco you can imagine in our long hot summers this this space would have been very pleasant in comparison to being cooped up inside without the breeze so it's a very important space and you find it in all the spanish colonial houses this one also had the staircase on it at that end of it at one time one of the unique things about many saint augustine houses is that because of our mild climate the circulation system the corridors gallerias and staircases are on the outside of the building you don't waste expensive interior space for your circulation system and you see that time and time again and it's because of our mild climate you go a little further north charleston and look at the famous charleston single house plan and their staircases on then inside the building because it's just that much colder in charleston in all the colonial homes i have been in i've never seen this what have we got here oh we have a bracero in spanish or brazier in english and it's way the uh the spanish would have heated their homes they did not generally use fireplaces except in very wealthy households and the gonzalez family were not wealthy people so you would have your kitchen in an auxiliary structure out in the yard separated from the main house for fire safety purposes and also in the long hot months you wouldn't heat up your main dwelling by having fires going but in the winter you would bring in charcoal from your kitchen in this bracero and it would slightly heat the room let's speak a little bit about the construction of the house we're standing in one of the two original rooms so originally it was just a two-room house now the gonzalez's eventually had 10 children six of whom lived to be adults so eventually there's extra rooms added to the rear we're not exactly sure of the date of those extra rooms they appear on a map in 1788 so there's some time before that but the main fabric of this two-room flat roofed house is made out of coquina stone coquina is our locally occurring limestone it's quarried across the bay on anastasia island and uh it's easy to quarry uh and so it has a lot of advantages the quarry is near a creek so that can be transported easily but it's very porous so all of the buildings need to be plastered in order for them to be watertight this room would have been part of the gonzalez's house but we interpreted as our british one of our british period rooms that's the time period between 1763 and 1784. you know um during the seven years war uh great britain captured havana cuba and in order to get cuba back uh in the um treaty at the end of the war spain gave up florida to great britain uh and that's when the gonzalez's uh leave florida and resettle in cuba it's um almost a complete population shift there were probably only 30 people in the entire peninsula of florida and that includes indians that stayed from the first spanish period into the british period it's incredible relocation yeah it's uh well the population was maybe around three thousand still but only 30 people left yes it was essentially five families in their slaves and two of those families were anglos that had been representing new york merchants here john gordon and jesse fish and they set themselves up as the real estate agents for the departing spaniards so they make a lot of money on that now you can imagine it's a town full of empty houses uh and this is the way john bartram uh describes the the city uh the the soldiers were looting houses for firewood uh for the british garrison there and very quickly the british decide to convert the former spanish monastery uh into an army barracks and build another larger barracks to the south of it so this part of town becomes very much a military enclave well amongst that millionaire military were joseph peaven uh he was a sergeant uh in the 60th regiment of foote and was actually at one time acting pay master but he sets up a tavern elsewhere in town in uh in by 1765 he sets up a tavern uh but then he decides in 1775 to purchase this property from jesse fish and fish send some money to the gonzalez family in cuba for that sale not a lot but some the because what could be more lucrative than running a tavern across the street from an army barracks i don't think there probably is anything more lucrative than that yes uh and uh so the crafty old sergeant sets this up as a tavern and he expands and build the second floor which we'll go to in a moment so we have this room set up as a tavern room uh also with his remodeling of the structure he adds a british style fireplace so that you're now no longer heating with a bracero you're now having a british corner fireplace and the room over here would have been used as the tap room where the large quantities of liquor and other items would have been stored dispensed by the barkeep over that half door and here on the table we have typical tavern activities uh smoking gambling and drinking so let's go on upstairs and have a look at the rooms that the pivots added very much in the british style this feels completely different than the downstairs it's dark it's cool and damp and this is a completely different room this is a british caribbean space tea tree ceilings like this are very common throughout the british caribbean this is a light and airy space we have it set up as a parlor which it may have been used in such a way by the pivots from time to time when they were living in this house but they were making a lot of money off these because they had this tower and another tavern they acquired several uh plantations or farms uh around the vicinity so for having been a sergeant in the army he was doing very well so they would have had high style furniture like this now joseph pivot dies in 1786 [Music] his wife now a wealthy widow lasts for about eight months before somebody decides to marry her and that somebody is john hudson who is a bit of a waster gambler drunkard and he went through her money so fast by 1790 they were broke and this property is sold at the bankruptcy sale and the man who purchases it is uh geronimo alvarez now alvarez was from asturias in northern spain and he was a baker by trade but um he was doing pretty well he had a bread contract to supply bread to the military he married antonia venz she only lived a few years after the marriage they have two children that survive to adulthood so he becomes a widower relatively quickly the alvarez families continues to own this house uh after geronimo's uh death in the uh 1740s and uh he had given this house to his son antonio and antonio dies in uh 1869 but he's living by then during the civil war he moves out to one of his farms and why don't we talk about the dining room for just a second so this is an added on part yes this section from the wall next to where you're standing uh this way was was added on uh we know that these rear walls were built probably about 1819 by the alvarez family although the lower rooms underneath here appear on a 1788 map now we interpret this space as a dining room though it probably never was this wide doorway was not added until the victorian era in the late 19th century dr carver who owned the house starting in 1886 he built a round tower which was a bedroom and this was kind of the hallway going into that bedroom that tower was removed in 1959 to make the house look more like it's 18th century itself or early 19th century itself but the tableware is based on archaeological evidence so we find a lot of shards in the ground of feather-edged pearl wear and canton china canton china is a good indicator of an affluent family because it came from so far away the poor people did not have canton china it's an amazing house for all the different time periods that come together we've got what 1720 all the way through and we didn't even cover some of the later periods right uh since your emphasis with the townsends is the 18th century uh early 19th century we didn't even talk about the late 19th century owners and the early 20th century owners you know maybe we try too much to explain the long history of this house but it is typical of buildings in saint augustine that have layers and layers and layers of history yeah i'm amazed thank you so much charles for giving us a full picture about what's going on with the house like this it is an amazing story thank you so much well it's been my pleasure thank you for coming

Channel: Townsends

Views: 377,122

Rating: 4.963418 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: ZSD-eDy2l5g

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/vonMishka]

This guy is a local treasure. If you want to know more about anything, go to the St. Augustine Historical Research Library. This great man taught me how to use old fire maps and town directories to uncover the history of my own home. He’s wonderful and so is the historical society that he represents.

[u/babydavissaves]

He did St. Auggie!? Nutmeg Tavern!? Heck ya!

[u/Jack120Red]

This channel is really interesting, I watched them build a cabin in the exact fashion that those in the civil war era would.

[u/Ender_User]

Oh cool, I'm surprised I didn't see this on youtube first. Would have been cool to see Townsend in St Aug!