Local Folks: Lisa & Scott Lofton
Lisa Lofton is a known artist around town. She is on the boards of two local nonprofits, serving as president of the Art Center Cooperative and as vice president of the Jacksonville Artists Guild. She’s also a member of the Art League of Jacksonville. She met her husband, Scott, at the University of Florida. On school breaks, they worked together at Jax Liquors. Now, Scott works for the Bank of America. What most residents don’t know about these local folks is that they are avid collectors of antique memorabilia.
Scott is a Jacksonville native born at Old St. Luke’s Hospital on 8th Street. As a preteen, Scott would come in behind city projects after heavy excavating had been done, after the workers left, and he and his cousin would rummage around and find treasures that Scott kept. “A lot of it was done on Bay Street along the parking lots that were put up near the Haydon Burns Library,” he said. They found a wide array glassware—soda bottles, whiskey bottles, medicine bottles. The colors range from cobalt blue to amber to clear. A few of the nicer pieces, he and Lisa now have as decoration throughout their home. Many are sitting in boxes in a storage unit because the collection is so large.
The Loftons enjoy visiting national parks, so they’ve done a lot of domestic travel. “We collect license plates from every state we’ve visited,” Lisa said. They now have 46 hanging on the fence in their backyard. “There’s a couple we don’t have yet, but we’re working towards that,” she added.
There’s something else hanging on that fence, too: a huge metal Coco-Cola sign that the Loftons consider one of the best finds ever. Scott dragged it out from underneath an old train station in a small city outside of Gainesville. He and his college roommates had been urban exploring out of sheer boredom. He admitted, “Lisa was far more studious than I was.” Lisa and Scott have other commercial signs of the day in their collection as well, like ones that used to hang in old ma and pa country stores.
“We find signage in various places,” Lisa said. While renovating their Murray Hill home, they came across an old handicap parking sign in the wall between a closet and the bathtub. It’s on the back fence now along with the old Florida license plate that they had found under a floorboard. Beneath the house were a few soda bottles from the 1950s that Scott was happy to add to his glass bottle collection. The entire reno project was like unearthing a time capsule. While digging in the backyard to plant flower beds, they also discovered a bag of someone’s old family photos. “That was a little creepy,” Lisa said. They still have some of them, the ones from the center of the pile that had been shielded from the moisture of the elements, but most had to be thrown away.
Though they thought the buried bag of photos was a bit creepy, Lisa and Scott didn’t mind too much, as they both like Halloween happenstance and touring old cemeteries. As a teenager growing up in Clifton, the place to go on Halloween was a small family cemetery on a plantation near the river that had been forgotten, grown over, and rediscovered. A group of ladies drafted Scott and his friends to assist with the clearing away of overgrown brush so that the headstones and markers could be revealed. Scott was enchanted. Today, visiting old cemeteries is something he and Lisa like to do because of the historic perspective. By reading headstones, especially the ones that include the manner of death, “you can get a good sense of how people lived,” Lisa said.
Another of the Loftons’ collection is comprised of old cameras. One had belonged to Scott’s mother. It’s the folding kind, and its leather case still has her name stenciled on it. They have a Kodak Brownie and some vacation color cameras. Some of the cameras are the silver and black ones that still have flash cubes attached. Later models, like the Polaroid Instamatic, are part of their collection as well. They’ve gotten most of them from antique stores in a variety of locales—sometimes in Riverside, sometimes in High Springs. It’s the workmanship that had gone into the cameras that intrigues Scott. “It took some engineering in those days,” he said. “I really just love the way they look,” said Lisa.
The Loftons also collect coins, movie theatre posters, and more. “I include the antiques in my paintings. There’s a lot of undiscovered stuff here,” Lisa said of Jacksonville. “You just don’t know what you’re going to find.”
By Mary Wanser
Resident Community News
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