"Stuart is burning down!"

On New Year's Day 1916, while many local residents were away at a Palm City picnic, a fire began in the J. B. McDonald Apartment House when tenant J. G. Moore lit an oil cooking stove in his apartment and left the room. The blaze consumed the second floor apartments, spread to the first floor businesses of Lawton F. Geiger's Proprietary Drug Store and Ice Cream Parlor and Dr. David M. Graham's medical office, and intensified as chemicals there exploded. By day's end, much of Stuart's Potsdam area had burned, including the drug store, many homes, and the Methodist Church. Several residences survived, including the Thomas House, a two-room home George W. and Agatha Kickliter Thomas occupied around 1902 after George Thomas turned from pineapple growing to carpentry and built it at Albany Avenue and 2nd Street to demonstrate his skill. The durable house later expanded with a side wing, a wide veranda, and a second story overlooking the river, and the Thomas/Edenfield family lived there until 1972. The Methodist congregation had earlier replaced its original building by the railroad tracks with a larger church with stained glass windows, a steeple, a bell, and a separate social hall, all of which were destroyed in the fire, but the community quickly raised more than $10,000 in addition to $2,000 in insurance to build an even grander replacement on the same site just over a year later.

Stuart, Florida · United States