What’s going on with the Jacksonville Fire Museum?

A piece of Jacksonville history has come under scrutiny. The Jacksonville Fire Museum has been closed since 2015, and still sits empty while the city spends thousands of dollars a month to store its artifacts.

“When it was open, it was touted as one of the great fire museums in the southeastern United States,” Wayne Wood explained.

Wayne Wood is a Jacksonville historian and former fire museum board member. He said Jacksonville’s history is steeped in fighting fires.

“Jacksonville’s central point of history is the Great Fire of 1901…this fire was so great, the flames could be seen glowing in the sky all the way in Savannah,” Wood said.

The museum once housed pictures of the Great Fire of 1901 and other large firefighting equipment from that era, but those artifacts are now in storage.

The building is the original Fire Station #3, which was rebuilt in 1902 after the Great Fire. It has been moved twice; the first time was in the 90s from its original location on Catherine St. to Metropolitan Park.

“It sat there in Metropolitan Park for a long time and gradually needed a lot of repairs and restructure, and so they closed the museum and it stayed closed for a while,” Wood explained.

Then in 2022, the city moved it again to its current home off Bay St.

Questions now surround how much this building is costing the city to sit empty. The city sunk more than $3.3 million dollars into moving the museum to Bay Street, which included retrofitting the new foundation and other repairs, according to Jacksonville Fire and Rescue. That money was funded through the city’s capital improvement plan.

Fire Chief Percy Golden took over JFRD in July of 2025. He said after looking into what was done under the previous administrations, he determined a structural analysis was needed. A report was finalized back in April 2026.

“We did a structural load test of the building to make sure that the artifacts and apparatus that we want to put in there could maintain that inside the building. During that load test, unfortunately, the building wasn’t load tested to be able to contain those items,” Golden  explained.

The report concluded that significant repairs were needed, including better reinforcement. The report states some of the past reinforcement work was installed incorrectly.

Golden said the department spent $7,500 on the structural review and $4,000 on termite mitigation in May 2026.

This money comes in addition to the thousands of dollars spent every month on storage. The museum artifacts used to be stored inside the building, but since 2023, JFRD has been paying more than $60,000 a year on storage with Warden Construction, according to invoices obtained by First Coast News. JFRD has been spending $6,500 a month on storage since August 2025 under a new contract with Warden. The total comes out to $266,877.

“We’re trying to preserve that history. Yeah, a lot of that stuff happened prior to us getting into these roles, and my job is now to get that building open,” Golden said.

Golden confirmed the money used for these expenses is coming from the city’s Capital Improvement Plan. According to the CIP for FY25-26, the city allocated $4.8 million to the Met Park Marina Fire Station, Museum & Dock/Design project.

Golden told First Coast News he is working to reopen the museum, and they are now in the process of getting estimates for the structural repairs that need to be done. The museum also lost its designation on the National Register of Historic Places because of the move in 2022, and he has dedicated personnel working to get it back on the list.

“I can’t say it enough. This is a key priority to me to get this museum open, but I want it done the right way and it’s safe for the community for years and decades to come,” Golden said.

Once repairs are made, Golden said there will be a grand reopening and a renaming of the building to the ‘Henry Bradley Fire Museum.’

“We’re excited about that. He was an African American firefighter that died as a volunteer, and his death caused Jacksonville to look at the fire department becoming the paid department and he was key to that, in that happening,” Golden explained.