JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A family-owned funeral home dating back to 1904 sits on Brentwood Avenue on Jacksonville's Northside. It began with a stern business woman whose audacity led to her family carving out a piece of history on the First Coast.
Holmes, Glover, Solomon is a funeral home that bears the names of a family legacy dating back nearly 120 years.
Royce Badger can point at any photo from the early 1900s on the walls of his family's funeral home and describe in detail what's on display.
"This is the building that the funeral home started in," Badger said. It was located on State and Broad streets in Downtown Jacksonville.
"It was rare and quite unpopular for a Black woman to own a business that had the funding to purchase vehicles at the volume that she had," Badger explained.
Just 13 years prior to the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, Rosa Glover was born. By age 26, Mrs. Rosa Holmes saw a need within her community and she met it with her own two hands.
"I hear stories from my aunts, grandmother, great grandmother of how strong her hands were," Badger said. "She and her sisters and cousins would build caskets with their hands."
She was a female funeral home director in the early 1900s, meeting the needs of grieving families while growing her own family's legacy.
"We have four generations of licensed funeral directors in our family," Victor Solomon Jr. said.
He's next in line, along with his sister Victoria to keep the family's planted roots firm within the city. Those roots were once at risk of being pulled in 1991.
"We were almost redlined essentially by the state," Solomon said. "They were trying to build FSCJ Downtown on State Street."
"We got the notification that we were going to be moved from our location, and Aunt Willie Lee said 'This can't happen,'" Badger said.
"She was able to convince the courts and the state through multiple hearings for us to have the building that we're in now," Solomon said.
Its current location is along Brentwood Avenue, just a block down the road from a marker that reads Victor Solomon Parkway.
"When he passed on, I learned what it really meant through that to value my last name," Solomon said.
His father was a well known educator and coach in Jacksonville.
"He died when I was 7," Victoria Solomon said. "I wasn't really around the funeral home, so I'm just now getting into the flow of things. It's taking some time but I'm getting used to it."
Victoria and Victor are being reared to keep the Aunt Rosie's funeral home alive.
"Education was the key to this Black family's success, and Aunt Rosie saw the need to educate everyone," Badger said.
Holmes raised several members of her family, “Including my mother," Shela Solomon said. "Their mother was deceased at a young age, and Aunt Rosie took over, and she sent them all to school."
Reminiscing while looking at a family photo hung in the halls of the historic funeral home, Badger recalled the type of women that built his family's legacy from the ground up.
"When Aunt Willie Lee or Aunt Faye picked up the phone and called you, you just did it," Badger said. "They didn't ask what you were doing or if it was important. They just said Royce I need you to do so and so and you did it. They were those types of people, they were commanding because they were taught the same way by Aunt Rosie. When she called they jumped."
Teaching lessons learned in life and death knowing well the importance of time, education and family.