Union Bank Building in Tallahassee, Florida

The Union Bank is a Greek Revival bank building completed in 1841 that the Florida Department of State considers Florida's oldest surviving bank building.

The Department of State says the building now stands just east of the Historic Capitol Museum on Apalachee Parkway, which is not where it was built: in 1971 it was moved from the west side of Adams Street, between College and Park Avenues. The Museum of Florida History exhibit calls it a rare territorial period structure, built to impress frontier Tallahassee residents with its Greek Revival architecture. Today the Museum of Florida History, part of the Department of State, presents it as a free museum in partnership with the Meek-Eaton Black Archives at Florida A&M University.

Its tenants trace Tallahassee's history. The building held a planter's bank, a Reconstruction bank for freed people, and, over the next century, a dance studio, shoe factory, church, youth center, beauty parlor, and state and county offices, before preservationists moved it to Apalachee Parkway.

The Union Bank was a planter's bank, created to draw outside capital into cash-poor North Florida so Tallahassee-area planters could finance plantations, railroads and ports.

According to the Museum of Florida History's online exhibit, Governor William P. DuVal advocated for a planter's bank, and Richmond merchant John Gamble and other Tallahassee-area planters banded together to form one. Florida's Legislative Council chartered the Union Bank of Florida in 1833, and the bank opened in 1835 in The Columns, a building then on Adams Street that now stands on Duval Street as Tallahassee's oldest surviving structure.

The bank's own building went up next door. Construction began in 1840 and was completed in March 1841. A lawsuit over the builder's estate noted that he built the bank with enslaved people, including a 33-year-old carpenter named Davy, whom the museum presents as representative of the hundreds of skilled enslaved Black craftspeople, including brickmakers, carpenters and plasterers, who built territorial Tallahassee. The exhibit introduction states that the planter's bank helped finance the spread of plantation agriculture and the expansion of slavery, and that it closed in 1843 due to an unstable economy and mismanagement.

The Freedman's Bank was the Tallahassee branch of the National Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, which occupied the Union Bank building from 1869 until the bank failed in 1874.

The Museum of Florida History reports that in 1869 the estate of William Bailey leased and then sold the building to the company. Congress had chartered the Freedman's Bank in 1865, a private bank meant to give newly freed Black Americans basic banking services, and it grew to 37 banks in 17 states by 1872. In Tallahassee, William Steward, a Black man, became cashier in 1870.

Both of the building's banks failed. The museum's exhibit on Black economic power says the Freedman's Bank failed in 1874 because of rapid expansion, poor management and the financial panic of 1873, that patrons received approximately 62 percent of their money back, and that the failure damaged Black Americans' trust in the federal government and financial institutions. The current Tallahassee exhibit, built with FAMU's Meek-Eaton Black Archives, gives the Reconstruction era its own section.

For roughly a century the Union Bank was rental space on Adams Street, home to a church, a feed store, a shoe factory, shops and public offices.

The museum's 1878 to 1925 page says a Reformed Episcopal congregation held services in the building through 1878 and bought it in 1879, and that Sanborn maps show a sleeping room in 1884, a storage room in 1895 and the city's gas and water office in 1909. Gramling's feed store business was founded in the building in 1915 and moved out in the 1920s to its longtime location just south of downtown. From 1927 to 1931 the W. Jiles Shoe Factory, a Black-owned Tallahassee business, occupied the south (now east) side of the building, and its customers included Governor Doyle Carlton, who supplied an alligator hide for a pair of boots.

Next door, The Columns housed the Dutch Kitchen restaurant from 1924 to 1956. The museum exhibit says its owners joined The Columns to the Union Bank with a brick addition used for dinner parties and civic meetings, and in the early 1930s split the Union Bank into two addresses, renting space to a beauty salon, a drapery shop, an appliance store, an exterminator, a charity thrift store and the county library.

The Union Bank was moved in 1971 to keep it from being torn down for a church parking lot on Adams Street.

The Museum of Florida History explains that the First Baptist Church bought the property after 1958 and in 1969 wanted the buildings removed or demolished for a parking lot, and that the president of the Florida Society of Colonial Dames XVII Century organized a campaign to save the bank. The Department of State reports it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 1971 and that the Colonial Dames XVII Century, by then its owners, donated it to the State of Florida in June 1971.

The move, in October 1971, was rough. The building traveled inch by inch from Adams Street to its new lot on Apalachee Parkway, about a half mile in two days. The museum cites contemporary newspaper accounts that it was in danger of rolling downhill into a barbershop, that movers threw timbers under the wheels, and that the trip did $2,500 of damage to city streets and opened large cracks in the walls.

Moving it did not save it. A decade later the building was still crumbling and many people, including legislators, considered it an eyesore. The museum reports that in 1981 the Legislature appropriated $10,000 to tear it down and Governor Bob Graham vetoed the bill. Lawmakers then agreed to a restoration estimated at $300,000, with the state paying half if another $150,000 could be raised in under two years. First Lady Adele Graham and former First Lady Mary Call Collins were among those who formed a group to raise it, the Tallahassee Democrat's editor came up with the slogan Invest in the Old Union, or IOU, and banking institutions in the state donated more than 80 percent of the funds.

The Union Bank Museum at 219 Apalachee Parkway holds an exhibit on the building's history and rescue, and it is open free on Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The restored bank opened as a museum in 1984, run at first by the Museum of Florida History. According to the A New Union page, the Meek-Eaton Black Archives at FAMU has operated it as a second site since 1995, and in 2023 the Department of State's Division of Historical Resources refreshed the building with paint, wood and stucco repairs and accessibility upgrades. The state held an open house on November 4, 2023, and the museum reopened on February 10, 2024, with a new exhibit created with the Meek-Eaton Black Archives, according to the Department of State's January 2024 release.

Hours have changed since then. The January 2024 release announced Thursday through Saturday hours beginning February 15, 2024; the Department of State museum page and the Museum of Florida History visit page, read October 18, 2026, now list Friday and Saturday only.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, with the Department of State's Union Bank Museum page and its 2023 and 2024 releases checked alongside the Museum of Florida History visit page and Union Bank exhibit pages.