The Lower Matecumbe Home

While the Starck home was the first home built on Lower Matecumbe, it is not the oldest home on the island. The oldest home on the island was not built on Lower Matecumbe – it was moved to the island by Anne Eaton in 1969. The house was already 60 years old at the time and in need of a major face lift. But what a grand story that “move” was! 

Anne was the wife of the famous Ohio Industrialist, Cyrus Eaton. Back in the '60s, Anne started taking her mother, Evelyn Kinder, on trips South. She began keeping an eye out for a possible winter place. During her first trip to the Keys in 1962, Anne stayed at Cheeca Lodge and fell in love with the area. She returned every year.

She set out to look for a house -- an old place where "you could sit around wearing a wet bathing suit and not hurt anything." Realtors kept showing her air-conditioned stucco with wall-to-wall carpeting -- not at all what Anne had in mind.

​On one expedition, when the Realtor had parked the car and left Anne in it while she got some coffee, Anne looked up and found herself right next to a derelict, abandoned old frame house. As her daughter, Lissie reports, “As she was looking at it, a shutter fell off one of the upstairs windows: ‘the house winked at me,’ she said. And it was all over. In that moment, she fell for the Old Albury House--later The Last Resort.”

The owner offered to give it to Anne if she would move it!  She certainly got no support from Cyrus as he was convinced that Anne was crazy to undertake such a foolhardy effort. But. she was determined. 

Being a lawyer's daughter, Anne knew she ought to have a proper transaction and a deed of sale. She bought the house for a dollar (which Mr. Albury later gave back so she could frame it, along with the deed).

Then came finding the right location to give the house a home! And she found just the right spot – Columbus Drive on Lower Matecumbe… a 17-mile trek down U.S. One. She had the house sawed in two to move each half down Old US 1 on a flatbed truck at 2 in the morning, clearing the sides of the old bridges by about 6". And once at its new location, her treasured house was put back together. And Anne saw to it that it was turned back around as the hurricane of 1935 had picked it up and turned it around so the ocean porch had been wrongly facing the street before the move.

Anne Eaton considered herself a very clever investor to have paid a total of $25,001 for her two lots, the house, and the moving expenses. The timing in 1969 was perfect, before the boom in real estate.
 
Dubbed the Last Resort, Anne was to say, again and again, that the best thing she ever did was buying that wonderful old house! Not only could she escape to it, but she could invite the world to visit her, and the world always left refreshed and enthusiastic.