MUSEUM & CULTURE
Ximenez-Fatio House Museum
St. Johns County · Atlantic Coast
A coquina merchant's house of 1798 on Aviles Street, kept as the boarding house it became when Florida's first tourists arrived.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Andres Ximenez, a merchant, built the house and its detached kitchen in 1798 from coquina quarried on Anastasia Island, in the style known as the St. Augustine Plan, part Spanish colonial and part Federal. It was a good house for its day. After his death it became something more interesting: a boarding house, bought by Margaret Cook in 1830, then Sarah Petty Anderson in 1838, then Louisa Fatio in 1855, each of them a woman running a business in her own name. Fatio made it known for its standards and its food, and it filled with the invalids and winter visitors who were Florida's first tourists. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Florida has owned it since 1939 and shows it as that boarding house rather than as a grand residence. More than fifteen archaeological digs on the site have turned up occupation from the sixteenth century onward. It stands at 20 Aviles Street
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