The historic Horace Drew Mansion, which has remained vacant and rundown for decades, now has a new owner.

Springfield Preservation and Revitalization is now the owner of the Drew Mansion on West 3rd Street. The previous owners, who live overseas, had racked up more than $2 million in code enforcement fines after they purchased the mansion but failed to bring the structure up to city code or prevent it from further becoming a public eyesore.

“We spoke with the owners, and they were able to deed the property over to us, which helped to resolve the issue they had with the city and allowed us to take on the property as a non-profit to rehabilitate it,” said SPAR Executive Director Michael Haskins.

SPAR already has short- and long-term plans for the mansion, which sits at the corner of 3rd and Pearl streets.

“Step one is securing the property, then protecting it from outside weather elements. Once we have that taken care of, we’ll work on our bigger vision, which is turning the first floor into a community space. It will be open to the public, and people will be able to see archives about Springfield,” Haskins said.

Haskins said he hopes to eventually register it as a museum.

“So we’ll start with a display and graduate from there. We would love to have a Springfield museum,” Haskins said.

Drew Mansion plans

Plans for the first floor also include a space for visitors to eat.

“Hopefully, we’ll have a vendor that can sell coffee, hot chocolate and pastries and people can enjoy themselves,” Haskins said.

Plans for the second and third floors include building office spaces for small businesses.

News4Jax toured the mansion, beginning in a massive dark basement that was vandalized with graffiti from the years of intruders who have illegally entered onto the gated property and snuck inside.

The main floor had a large room and showed signs of unfinished renovations by previous owners, as well as graffiti on some walls that were still intact. There also was an old piano in one of the rooms that has been there for decades.

The second and third floors had even larger rooms, signs of unfinished renovations, graffiti and flooring that has seen better days. In fact, there were areas of the floor that were either rotted away or had holes big enough to see into the rooms below.

The third floor had a turret with large arched openings that provided a clear view of Klutho Park across the street and Downtown Jacksonville in the distance.

Rehabbing the mansion won’t happen overnight, and there’s a chance the $1.5-million renovation cost could increase. Despite that reality, Haskins said SPAR is determined to turn the historic mansion into something Springfield residents can be proud of.

“We wanted to step in and prove that even those very difficult properties, there is still a future for them, and we can still make a solution, even when it’s difficult,” said Haskins.

Back in July, News4Jax spoke with Jacksonville Department of Public Works Manager Al Ferraro, who oversees the city’s blight initiative, a program designed to end blight throughout Jacksonville.

Ferraro said that although the property was listed as one of the most endangered historical structures in Jacksonville, it had become so blighted that the city considered demolishing it because the owners at the time were not doing anything to keep the property up to code, as fines were mounting into the millions of dollars.

“If it were not under historic preservation, we would have moved forward on tearing it down already,” Ferraro explained. “But because it’s under historic preservation, or landmarks, there’s another set of criteria we go under.”

Part of the criteria included a meeting with the owners to discuss an alternate option. The city recommended that the owners speak with SPAR, and after some negotiating, SPAR took over ownership of the property with the understanding that SPAR would renovate the mansion into a community space.

SPAR wants to restore the structure to what it looked like during its glory days.

Mansion history

The mansion was built in 1909 by Dr. Horace Drew, a renowned physicist and grandson of Jacksonville pioneer Columbus Drew.

At the time, the mansion was considered unique due to the blending of architectural styles.

The Drew Mansion was eventually abandoned in the late 1960s through the early 1970s until another family purchased the home. The family renovated and lived in the mansion until 2006. Over the years, others have purchased and sold the property. At one point, hundreds of thousands of dollars were pledged to restore the mansion, but restoration stopped and the mansion became unsightly to neighbors.

“It’s an eyesore. You know that at one point in time it was a gorgeous mansion, but we’ve lived here in Springfield the last nine years, and it’s just become an eyesore,” said neighbor Jamey Evoniuk.

Multiple neighbors told News4Jax that it was common to see drug addicts, human traffickers and homeless people sneaking in and using the mansion for shelter and illegal activities. They also said it was common to walk past the mansion at night and see flashes go off inside from people taking pictures to prove they were inside the “haunted mansion.”

According to published reports, on the night of March 13, 1970, a group of high school students snuck into the vacant mansion, as it was known to be a haunted house. While the teens were inside, two armed men entered the mansion and forced the group into a bathroom before kidnapping two girls from the group and sexually assaulting them. 

Several months after that horrific event, on a June afternoon, two kids ventured into the backyard, where they discovered a plastic bag containing a human head. According to published newspaper reports, the head was reported stolen from the Duval Medical Center and belonged to a man who donated his body to become a teaching cadaver.

According to a book called Abandoned North Florida, an informant told investigators the head was taken by an orderly who worked at the hospital. The following month, the orderly was arrested and charged with dealing in dead bodies

An odd twist to the story is that the orderly not only knew the man who donated his body to the medical center, but after stealing the man’s head, he slept with it the first night before burying it in the backyard of the mansion and occasionally showed it off to friends.

Perhaps, when the renovations are complete and the property no longer looks spooky and rundown, it will no longer be considered “haunted.”

“The community excitement around this project has been incredible. People are incredibly supportive,” Haskins said.

This story was produced by News4Jax, a Jacksonville Today news partner.