14 fascinating women with Jacksonville ties

[thelakelander]

In honor of Women's History Month, we pay homage to the contributions of fourteen fascinating women in history with Jacksonville ties.

Read More: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/14-fascinating-women-with-jacksonville-ties/

[jaxlongtimer]

Here is a great update by Mark Woods to this article as we begin to honor global aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman on the 100th anniversary of her death in Jacksonville during preparation for an air show in the Paxon area in 1926.  The Jaxson even gets a mention!

And, this is another great example why our old buildings need to be preserved... to tell our rich history, locally, state-wide, and nationally.  Imagine how much we have already lost... we need to preserve the precious buildings that remain.

100 years after death, Bessie Coleman's legacy lives on

The safe was tucked in an alcove, in a back room of a two-story brick building in LaVilla that opened in 1916 and operated as a funeral home for more than 100 years, until it closed in 2019.

Eric Adler bought the property at 525 W. Beaver Street two years later, saying he was going to lean into its history while turning it into an "apart-hotel" with 13 short-term rental apartments.

When Adler first walked into the building, he knew its walls contained some of the history that had managed to avoid the wrecking balls that demolished much of LaVilla at the end of the last century. He knew it was designed and built by Joseph H. Blodgett for Lawton Leroy Pratt, the second Black licensed mortician in Florida. He knew that for decades the Pratt Funeral Home, which became the Hillman-Pratt Funeral Home and finally Hillman-Pratt & Walton, was an integral piece of African-American life and death in Jacksonville....

...When Barry Underwood of Avant Construction entered the combination and opened the safe — and when Adler realized what was in there and let Mitch Hemann, archivist at the nearby Ritz Theatre and Museum, know about it — Hemann said, "It felt like a lottery win."...

....There were 16 funeral ledgers, going back to the early 1900s, containing the records of thousands of funerals....

....But there was one in particular that documented this building's place in American history, part of the Jacksonville connection to an early 20th century celebrity — someone whose name ended up on a roads near airports, whose face was put on quarters and stamps, whose picture was taken into space by an astronaut....

...So when they found the ledgers, he looked up the date of death — April 30, 1926 — found the ledger from that timeframe, flipped through the pages and ...

"Boom," he said, "there she is."

Bessie Coleman....

...Adler could've knocked it down and built a new building, just like some of the ones that will go up nearby. Not that he ever considered doing that....

...The Jaxson had put together a list of historic sites in downtown that could be demolished with little to no public notification. The Hillman-Pratt Funeral home was one of them....

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/columns/mark-woods/2026/04/17/funeral-home-safe-contained-record-of-bessie-colemans-1926-death/89632789007/?tbref=hp

[thelakelander]

Those funeral ledgers need to be scanned and made publicly available so the Black community will have access to their ancestor's records.

[jaxlongtimer]

Those funeral ledgers need to be scanned and made publicly available so the Black community will have access to their ancestor's records.

If you read the full article, they are donating them to the Ritz Museum which is planning to scan them for use in research.

[thelakelander]

I've been coordinating with the Ritz for the last year or two. Working on a renovation and update of the museum. Hopefully, that happens.