Remember When: The Traveling Gold Cabinet

Daughter of the late Walter Merrill and Mary Jim Hilson Merrill, she grew up in Andalusia and married an Andalusia boy Jim Moates.

Walter Merrill now and is Chief of Staff at Vanderbilt University where he and his family live in Nashville.

That interesting building on the corner of Church Street and Baisden Street built in 1950 is being revitalized by the Baumgartners and will open as “The B” .

Many times I have looked at a piece of antique furniture and thought: “Oh, if you could talk! The stories you could tell!”   Our family has an antique gold cabinet with beveled mirrors that has been handed down for at least six generations.

The first that was known of the cabinet, once said to be a copy of a cabinet like Marie-Antoinette would have enjoyed in her boudoir, was part of a set purchased by Irving Benjamin Hilson in the early 1900s for his home in Arcadia, Florida, near Milton, Florida.

The Hilsons managed to rebuild, and for the next twenty years, they lived in the Pensacola and Milton areas and published newspapers.

Hilson’s son, Joe Hilson, and his wife, Ada Ramsey Hilson, moved to Andalusia in 1939 when Joe became manager of the Coca Cola Bottling Company.

The cabinet was there only a short time before Mary Jim moved to Pensacola into a home decorated with Danish Modern furniture–not a good match for the elegant gold cabinet.

Marianne and Jim moved to Stone Mountain, GA in 1989, and the cabinet was wrapped once more as it rode across I-20 to its new home.

The grandchildren were polled: does anyone want or have room for a large, gold antique cabinet?  They had their homes and their decorations, and no one could take the cabinet.

Though not monetarily valuable, the cabinet’s true value is in the stories it holds and the family connections.

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