After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1851, Calvin Oak was told he would be dead within six months. Oak decided to move his family from Vermont to Jacksonville, Florida in hopes that a warmer, sunny environment would cure his ailment. Surrounded by fresh air, Calvin Oak lived another 30 years and became one of Jacksonville’s most prominent businessmen. He built the first factory in the city, a gun plant that manufactured guns, barrels, and cartridges. Oak also purchased and operated a jewelry store on Bay Street. In 1856, Calvin Oak and his son, Byron, opened a marble and mortuary business. After his father passed away, Byron continued growing the company as the Moulton & Kyle Funeral Home.
In 1914, Mark & Shetfall, a local architecture firm, was hired to design a two-story Prairie School style building at 17 West Union Street in downtown Jacksonville. Due to high demand for parking, an attached garage was built twelve years later that featured a turntable which allowed cars to drive into the building and turn around facing the street. The funeral home became known as the Kyle-McLellan Funeral Home after S.M. McLellan purchased the business. In the early 1990s, the Peeples Family Funeral Home purchased the property. After almost a century of operating at the West Union Street building, the business was moved in 2013 and the building at West Union Street was left abandoned. Today, the building has a partially collapsed roof and stands at the mercy of the harsh Florida weather.
On Saturday night, January 9, 2021, authorities were called to the abandoned Moulton & Kyle Funeral Home for a three-alarm fire. It took more than 100 firefighters an hour to get it under control. When they arrived, flames forced them back out of the building as the roof and second floor collapsed. The smoke plumes were so thick they showed up on local weather radar. The surrounding area near the old funeral home will be closed for several days due to the fire. According to JSO, the City of Jacksonville obtained an emergency order and is tearing down the building on Monday, January, 11, 2021.
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Just wow.
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A funeral for $5 cash in 1895…..
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Another wonderful piece–I enjoy reading (and seeing) your work very much.
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Very Good work!
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Thank you!
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Your obsession with old buildings is contagious. I’ve started to blog about them as well! Nice work!
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I appreciate your comment. It is very contagious!
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Great pictures.
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Thank you!
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Wow..your photography is wonderful and the story these photos tell are worth the time it took to take them. Amazing the things we leave behind and those boxes with the cremated remains of those three women! I wonder why they were left behind… Thanks for sharing! 🙂
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I am thinking the same thing about the remains. Very saddening.
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I so much enjoyed your article and pictures. I worked there in the early 60’s and knew Mr. Kyle and Mr. McLellan. Mr. Kyle was a very special man. He would have me drive him around Jacksonville and tell me the stories of the city from way back. He was very dignified but also had a great (albeit dry) since of humor. I had so much respect for him. i remember when he passed away the Governor, congressmen, the mayor attending his funeral. He was loved by everyone.
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Just curious if anyone has ever attempted to delivery the remains of the woman to their families. Surely someone would want them…..that makes me sad. Incredible photos and stories!
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They were probably unclaimed then and remained in the funeral home for the last 60+ years.
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I thought of that too. Somebody could easily find family members. Sad. Also wondering why they would leave behind such valuable items and not move them to the new building. Wondering if they had any looting of furniture, etc.
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I’m a funeral director in Tennessee. I have 16 sets of cremains at my funeral home that the families do not want for various reasons. Many are pathetic reasons they should be ashamed of . Not everyone is as caring as you and I are. The longer the cremains sit the harder it is to reunite with a family member willing to take them. I had a “wife” threaten to sue me for reaching out to her step daughter to pick up her father’s cremains because the new wife didn’t want them. The new wife didn’t want them but she didn’t want his own daughter to have them either. In Tennessee after 90 days we (the funeral home) can legally dispose of unclaimed cremains as we see fit, but our attorneys are still afraid of lawsuits and advise us to hang onto them. My oldest set in storage is from 1983. There are two sets among the 16 that are veterans that we can inurn at the national cemetery in Chattanooga. It’s heartbreaking, it really is.
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Wow, that’s really interesting.
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I’ve photographed a lot of abandoned places but nothing as creepy and poignant as this funeral home. You handled it with skill showing what needs to be shown and the history you provided allows us to really get to know this place along with your photographs.
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Thank you, I appreciate it.
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I worked there in 62 i believe (19 or 20 y/o) this brought back memory. Would like to talk with author/photographers. Tom Jones
tjones049@att.net
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Wow. I live down the street from Thomas Whitehead. It’s sad that the remains where left behind. I’d like to find my Uncle’s remains. He passed around 1993 in Jacksonville, FL. Wonder if he’s there.
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I was told by a mortision in Huntsville AL that they have by law to keep cremains no matter how long they can’t even inter them. They have to stay. Check f homes in area your uncle cremains may be there
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I would love to know if anything from this funeral home can be legally removed and kept, since it all appears to be abandoned. As a death educator with a licensed embalmer in the family, we would be highly interested in claiming any of these items for historical and educational purposes. Do you have any idea whom to contact about this? Thanks!
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The property is still owned by a funeral home across town.
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These photographs remind me of a foreclosed funeral home I toured while working for a bank. It was an old black funeral home. Not sure what year they opened but the quality of equipment and furniture was certainly not elegant. Some of the setup and techniques used in the embalming room were sad. In my instance I can understand everything being left “as is”. But I can’t imagine why a business would just walk away and leave everything (including business records and unclaimed bodies) just to move across town. Why do you think no one ever went back to clean stuff out?
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This has to be the result of a family argument. The funeral home appears to be upscale, so people who buy good caskets and have good ceremonies usually see the funeral home as a sacred place, a tomb that beloved family members were care for, washed and prepared. This is not only a strange incident, it is a strange part of the city, any city.
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What an interesting read – cheers for sharing
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The bodies may have been of the last living member of a family or a possibly a member who was removed from the family. Such a sad thing.
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Like to visit that place sometime in the near future
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This place was beautiful and in pristine condition when I worked there in the early 90’s. My little girl played here often when she was a very young child.
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I would like to purchase one of the caskets. They look beautiful.
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Coffee table? Guest bed?
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It greatly concerns me if there’s a pipe organ in the funeral home’s chapel that’s left to decay. Since it is a very old, prestigious funeral parlor, I’m assuming a pipe organ was installed in the facility. I’ve had many long bouts of depression, sadness and crying spells after seeing what has happened to chapel and church organs that were abandoned and destroyed by evil, sadistic vandals, rodents and the elements. Something needs to be done (laws enacted?) to ensure that these magnificent instruments are rescued, housed and protected from any further harm.
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