Building owner reflects on 140 years of Palatka history
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SARAH CAVACINI/Palatka Daily News – Tate and Jessie Miller stand on the front porch of their Palatka bed-and-breakfast, Grand Gables Inn.
The walls of a Palatka bed-and-breakfast hold a story of grandeur, abandonment and revival.
Grand Gables Inn, 603 Emmett St., turns 140 years old this year, and owner Tate Miller looked back on the building’s long history.
Trip Advisor named the eight-bedroom bed-and-breakfast one of the top places to stay internationally in 2020 and 2022, according to Miller. However, the story starts a century before then.
Grand Gables Inn is also known as the Conant House, named after Civil War Maj. Sherman Conant, also the Southern Railway general manager, who built the home in 1884. He lived there with his family for four years.
It was once described as “perhaps the most palatial home in all of Florida,” according to the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation Inc.
“I have to tell you, when I first read that, I thought, ‘Hah. That’s silly. That’s just a bunch of braggadocio,’” Miller said. “But it turned out to be true.”
At first, Miller said, he didn’t understand why anyone would build such a grand home in Palatka, but then he realized Palatka was one of the most significant cities in the state during the time Conant built the house.
The home boasts a tower, a basement, an attic big enough for numerous rooms, a dining and kitchen area, Queen Anne-style architecture, and cherry and walnut wood for the walls brought specially from the northern part of the United States, Miller said.
There’s even a tunnel inside the basement that a former owner sealed off. Miller said the tunnel used to connect to the St. Johns River, but no one has ever confirmed the purpose of the tunnel.
“But over a 100-year period, it took quite a beating,” he said. “It had about 10 different owners. And in the 1980s, there was an owner who couldn’t pay for the house, and they abandoned it.”
Once abandoned, the Conant House became subjected to vandalism and theft, with people ransacking the once-grand building, Miller said. The home was used as apartments in the 1960s, and the Daily News reported it once housed a girls’ school.
Hope for the home wasn’t lost, however. In 1991, Pauline Pellicer embarked on a mission the Daily News dubbed “Save the Queen.” She and her husband, former Putnam County Sheriff Walt Pellicer, bought the home for $50,000 and spent seven years renovating the property, the Daily News reported.
Pamela Garris, the Pellicers’ daughter, said her mom never began a project she couldn’t handle. Pauline Pellicer refurbished the home and brought it up to code for it to serve as a bed-and-breakfast, Garris said.
“She loved it,” Garris said. “It was her passion. A lot of Palatka wouldn’t be there if people had not taken an interest in these old homes.”
While the Pellicer family renovated the home, they bought a used dump truck because they needed to take all of the plaster out of the aging building and redo the wiring and plumbing. Garris said the whole process was a big ordeal for her family, and she has photos of the house when it was merely a shell because of all the repairs.
While Garris didn’t grow up in the home, she helped keep it clean from 2009 to 2013. Her family also hosted Christmas parties and gatherings at the Conant House, she said.
“It was an interesting life in that house,” she said.
Miller, who bought the property in 2016, said Pauline Pellicer saved the home. For that, he and his wife, Jessie Miller, named the front parlor Pauline’s Parlor to honor her work.
“After we (bought) it, we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘OK, now what?’” Tate Miller laughed. “Pauline did all this incredible work to fix it up, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s just go ahead and try what she started.’”
The Millers have Grand Gables Inn on the market for sale because they are trying to move closer to family. Duck Realty has the home listed for $1.25 million.
