THE OLDEST HOUSE

14 ST. FRANCIS STREET
ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

This print is an offset lithograph reproduced from a wood engraving in the 1872 edition of “Picturesque America” The original drawing was by Harry Fenn.

The Gonzalez-Alvarez House, known to generations of tourists and townspeople as “The Oldest House,” is one of the country’s most-studied and best-documented old houses.

For more than a hundred years after St. Augustine’s founder, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, landed in 1565, the little community was repeatedly raided and burned by the English and by pirates. Yet, despite those dark days of violence, the site of the Oldest House has been continuously occupied by Europeans and Americans since the early 1600’s.

Palm thatching over a crude structure of logs and boards formed the earliest shelters here. An early house on this site was probably of these materials; it burned in 1702. The hut was soon replaced with a less-crude structure of coquina stone, native shellstone found across the bay on Anastasia Island. The original walls of that ancient structure form part of what is now “The Oldest House.”

Tomas Gonzalez y Hernandez, an artilleryman at the Castillo de San Marcos (the fort), lived here with his family. We know from church records that one of their babies died in the house in 1727.

Some forty years later, when the British had taken over St. Augustine, the house was owned by Maj. Joseph Peavett, paymaster for English military, After his death, his widow, Mary (Maria), remarrried and continued to live in the house. Maria Peavett’s life became the basis for the novel, “Maria,” by Eugenia Prince, in which this old house is often mentioned and described. Maria’s new husband was a gambler and spendthrift. He ran up so many debts that the house had to be sold at auction in 1790.

A Spaniard, Geronimo Alvarez, purchased the house. He and his descendants occupied it for almost 100 years.

In 1882, the house passed into other hands, and for the next four decades was home to various occupants. The St. Augustine Historical Society acquired the property in 1918 and since then has presented it on exhibit for what it is – a structure which in itself tells of nearly 400 years of life in St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city.