JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — Before the building that burned in Saturday's fire in downtown Jacksonville turned into ashes, it housed them.
"It was built as the Kyle Moulton Funeral Home," Tim Gilmore, a professor at Florida State College at Jacksonville said.
Gilmore wrote about the history of the building that dates back to 1914.
"They could trace their heritage back as the oldest continuously operating business in Jacksonville. Yeah, going back almost to the start," he said.
The funeral home was tied to the business Calvin Oak and Son, which dated back to 1856, just a few decades after Jacksonville was founded.
“The funeral home business had left so many things behind inside that when urban explorers would go into the building, you know, they were stunned to see just the furniture sitting around, chandeliers hanging, old hearses and ambulances," Gilmore said.
"There were all kinds of records. There were old funeral programs. There were even boxes of cremains that nobody had that had been there for decades and decades that no one had ever picked up," he said.
The funeral home went out of business in 1992.
"When urban explorers got into the building, it was like, it was kind of like, a time capsule in a sense, like time had just, you know, stopped and coated everything and dust," Gilmore said.
"The fact that it has that long of a story, that its lineage goes that far back, even if the building itself, while historic, doesn't go that far back, I think is really significant. And it's really sad to lose those kinds of architectural markers of the city's history," he said.
This historic Jacksonville building returned to ashes Saturday night.