Jacques Klempf and his daughter, Alexandria, tethered themselves to a lift to help recover what’s likely the drafting table of Henry Klutho, famed Jacksonville architect.
The relic had been left on the rotted second floor of the Bostwick Building, amid business papers and blueprints belonging to Klutho, one of the last office tenants before the historic Downtown building fell into disrepair.
Today, the drafting table has a new home.
The Klempfs three weeks ago donated it and hundreds of other items recovered during their renovation of the 1902 bank building to Jacksonville’s Museum of Science and History.
MOSH Curator Alyssa Porter presented the Cowford Collection at a news conference Thursday.
“It’s nearly a century’s worth of history,” Porter said. “To have this collection and to explore that history is an exciting opportunity.”
Porter unveiled a jumble of bank ledgers, bills, letters and mortgages deeds, dating back to 1903. The collection also has old jewelry, watches and a silver spoon.
There is a document about how to run your own flower shop, put out by the local department of commerce. There is a commemorative coin from Queen Mary’s 1911 coronation.
“It gives you a picture of the things that mattered to them,” Porter said.
It will take years to learn the stories behind them, she said, and some may never be known.
For others, the significance is already clear.
Like birth certificates from members of the Bostwick family.
Patriarch Dr. William M. Bostwick was a founding director of First National Bank of Florida, which was later taken over by Guaranty Trust and Savings Bank.
For over a century, the building would be owned by or closely associated with members of Bostwick’s family.
With the certificates there was a folded $10 bill, wrapped in a slip of paper that says “Charles’ 1st retainer.” It was the first money Charles W. Bostwick Jr. earned as an attorney.
The Klempfs found many of the objects in the nearly 180 security and safe deposit boxes inside one of the old bank vaults.
Some of the boxes were already empty, but others hadn’t been opened in 80 years.
“Part of what was so bizarre to me was no one thought to take a look inside them,” Klempf said.
Opening them was exciting, and the team had aspirations of finding a Hope Diamond.
Jacksonville history, instead, ran the gamut from the expected to the strange. From deeds, judgments and insurance papers to jewelry, teeth with gold fillings and locks of hair.
Klempf, owner of Dixie Egg Co. and a Jacksonville restaurateur, purchased the old bank building at auction two years ago. He’s renovating the site and plans to open the Cowford Chophouse, a high-end steak and seafood restaurant, this summer.
A Jacksonville native, Klempf wanted to save the historic building from ruin. The objects inside seemed valuable as well.
As the team worked, Klempf stored anything of value at his warehouse until he could find a permanent home for them.
“I thought, I’ve got all of this stuff. I wanted to at least take care of it instead of destroy it,” he said.
The warehouse was refrigerated and that helped preserve the items, Porter would later tell Klempf.
The bank’s old concrete vaults were demolished in the renovation. But in doing so, the team learned new things about them.
The structures had been wrapped in railroad ties, with rebar weaved between them, apparently to deter tunneling bank robbers.
Klempf did save a 50,000-pound steel safe from inside one of the vaults. But it was too big and heavy for MOSH to accept.
It still sits in Klempf’s warehouse — right next to his company’s eggs.
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