A museum in St. Augustine, Florid has a rather unusual artifact – an ancient rug made completely out of cat fur. This rug is sometimes referred to as the ‘Sacred Cat Rug’ and has a claim on the title of ‘Oldest Rug in the World’.
Editor s note: Last month, as part of The Record s Where History Lives series, Peter Willott wrote about the mystery of the Florida Southwestern Railway and the two brothers, Fred and Floyd Perry, who built their very own locomotive in a St. Augustine backyard. Floyd s son, Charles Perry, saw the story and reached out to St. Augustine Historical Society s Chief Librarian Bob Nawrocki with more information. On Wednesday, Nawrocki and Willott met Charles Perry at his St. Augustine home where helped to unravel some of the mystery.
Fred Perry was fascinated with railroads from an early age, Charles Perry said. As a boy growing up on Florida s west coast in the early 1900s, he would flag down trains and convince the conductors to give him a ride into town.
In the front of an old building on Main Street in Hastings is a historical marker telling visitors a short story of the little town in southern St. Johns County.
Behind the sign is a large coquina building that opened in 1924 and once housed the town s kindergarten through high school, and then the town s city hall. Now, in a small section of the building, it is home to a county library branch.
For Greg Leonard, author of Hastings: Florida s Potato Capital, the town behind the sign is what his book is about. The sign gives you this kind of a glimpse about Hastings, Leonard said. But if you really want to know what s behind that story, this book will tell you a lot more about what was going on in this special little town.