Lion Fountain

The Lion Fountain, believed to date from around the 1910s, was at the Pines Hotel that once stood adjacent to the Panama City Depot off Beach Drive where today’s Chevron tanks are. Many locals called it a horse trough during its time near the industrial train depot, and there remained speculation over whether it was ever used to water horses. In the 1920s, it was moved to the St. Andrews neighborhood of Old Town to the West 10th Street property of Alphaeus Patrick Manghum, who was born in 1881 in Alabama, worked as a wholesale fish dealer, and was known for an underground structure behind his house that contained a moonshine still during Prohibition. Manghum changed ownership of the 10th Street property from person to person to avoid the law taking the house because of the moonshine. In 1944, Harbormaster J.N. “Shady” Arnold and his wife Ann purchased the property and acquired the Lion Fountain, which remained in the Arnolds’ front yard as a bird bath until the St. Andrews Methodist Church purchased the property in the late nineties. In 2009, the church donated the fountain to the St. Andrews Community, and it was moved to its current location in Oaks by the Bay Park. A grant from the State of Florida Coastal Partnership Initiative, received by the Historic St. Andrews Waterfront Partnership in cooperation with the City of Panama City and CRA, helped enhance the park’s east entrance, stabilize and preserve the historic Lion Fountain, now a seasonal planter, and educate the public about the coastal resources of the St. Andrews area.

Panama City, Florida · United States