THE DEAN OF FLORIDA ARCHITECTS
By Wayne W. Wood
Mellen Greeley walked with a cane, but his stride was brisk. He had a full head of snow-white hair, and, despite the warmth of the afternoon, he was wearing a tie. He had just set a bowl of dogfood in the grass twenty feet away, so he and I would be able to watch as the racoons emerged from the marsh grass. First one, then two, now four or five, enjoying their daily handout. Greeley joined me on the bench in his yard, overlooking the Arlington River.
He was the last of the great architects who had helped rebuild Jacksonville after the Great Fire of 1901. He was 94 years old and still sharp as a razor. I had come to interview him about the buildings he had designed, but our conversation turned into much more. It was the beginning of a brief but remarkable friendship.
Greeley was born in Jacksonville and grew up in a two-story house on Riverside Avenue (then known as “Commercial Street”) in 1880. The Haskell building is located on that site today, but back then it was way out in the country. His father, Jonathan C. Greeley, had served as Jacksonville’s mayor in 1873 and nine years later was elected to the Florida State Senate. Greeley’s mother died when he was just six years old, and the boy was sent off to boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, when he was eleven. In the early 1890s, he returned home from school to find that his father had hired a bunch of ship’s carpenters to build a four-story addition onto his house. Despite its being one of the most remarkable houses ever built in Jacksonville, young Greeley thought it was a monstrosity.
At age eighteen, Greeley dropped out of school and volunteered for service in the Spanish American War. He was a Corporal in the 3rd U.S. Volunteer Engineers and served briefly in Cuba. Upon returning from the war, he got a job as a scaler at the Cummer Lumber Company’s sawmill near Jacksonville, and he then enlisted in the state militia, aka the Jacksonville Light Infantry.
