If you've driven MacArthur Boulevard toward the south tip of Hutchinson Island any time this year, you've probably slowed down at the scaffolding. The old white cottage that usually sits open to the ocean, the one with the rocking chairs on the porch and the view of both the Atlantic and the Indian River Lagoon, has spent most of 2026 wrapped in plywood and construction fencing. Anyone who lives near Island Club has probably assumed the same thing I did: a paint job, maybe some structural touch-ups, done by summer's end.
That's not what's happening. And the difference matters if you've ever ridden a bike past that building without stopping.
What the Scaffolding Is Actually Hiding
Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge is the last of ten rescue houses Florida built in the 1880s to shelter shipwrecked sailors along a coastline with no lighthouses and no towns for a hundred miles. It's the oldest structure in Martin County. It turned 150 years old on March 10, 2026, and the Historical Society of Martin County used that milestone as the moment to stop patching the building and actually take it apart.
Here's the part most people driving past have missed: the anniversary already happened. Five months ago, this house turned a century and a half old with its porch slats pulled off and its windows on a truck bound for Ohio. There was no ribbon, no open house. The building's biggest birthday in its history came and went while it sat gutted behind the fence line.
According to the Society's own restoration updates, the work has gone well past cosmetic. Structural pillars are being reinforced with cement. Porch slats have been removed entirely for assessment. As of a recent construction update, paint removal was roughly 80 percent complete, and a lot of the original wood underneath turned out to be too far gone to save. Windows, woodwork, and other architectural pieces have been shipped to a restoration workshop in Ohio, where craftspeople are rebuilding them piece by piece before they come back to the coast.
That's a meaningfully different project than a facelift. A 150-year-old wood building sitting a few dozen feet from saltwater doesn't age evenly, and this restoration is the first time in a long while that anyone has looked underneath the paint to find out how much of the original 1876 material actually remained. The honest answer, based on how much has needed replacing, is not much. Whenever the doors reopen, what visitors walk into will be historically accurate and structurally new in a lot of places most people will never notice.
For anyone who's walked past that porch a hundred times without giving it a second thought, that's worth knowing before it reopens.
What Comes Back When the Plywood Comes Down
No reopening date has been announced. What is public is that the Historical Society isn't just rebuilding what was there. It's using the closure to add three new exhibits that will greet visitors whenever the doors do reopen:
- The Tempest
- The Overlook Gallery
- While We Kept Watch
None of the details on content have been released yet, but the names alone signal a shift from a static "here's an old building" tour to something more narrative, built around the storms that made the house necessary in the first place and the keepers who lived there watching the horizon for wrecks. Given the site's role in Florida's early maritime rescue history, that's a reasonable bet.
Two Miles Up Ocean Boulevard, a Different Kind of Access
The House of Refuge doesn't operate alone. It's a satellite of the Elliott Museum, about two miles away on Ocean Boulevard, and the two sites have always been sold as a pair for visitors willing to buy the combination ticket. While the House of Refuge is closed to the public during restoration, the Elliott has been running something worth knowing about if you live close enough to just show up.
Through September 30, 2026, the museum is offering a locals-only Behind-the-Scenes Garage Tour every Tuesday at 11 a.m., led by car curator Jim Ferrare. It's included with paid admission and takes visitors into the parts of the Elliott's vehicle collection that don't normally get seen, the mechanics behind the museum's robotic car-racking system that retrieves vintage vehicles on demand rather than parking them in a static row. The museum holds one of the largest collections of historic Ford Model A and Model AA commercial vehicles anywhere, alongside a baseball memorabilia collection and a rotating exhibit gallery.
It's a small thing, a Tuesday morning tour, but it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're actually watching what the local historical society is doing this season instead of relying on a five-year-old "things to do" list.
The Two Sites, Side by Side Right Now
| Site | Status through fall 2026 | What you can actually do |
|---|---|---|
| Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge | Closed for structural restoration; passed its own 150th anniversary in March 2026 mid-construction, no reopening date announced | View the exterior and beach from outside the fence line; grounds remain visible from the public shoreline |
| Elliott Museum | Fully open, regular hours | Locals-only Garage Tour, Tuesdays at 11 a.m. through Sept 30, led by curator Jim Ferrare |
That contrast is the current state of the two sites your neighborhood has treated as a package deal for years. One is mid-transformation. The other is quietly running a program most people driving past won't know exists unless someone tells them.
Why This Is Worth Knowing Now, Not Later
Whenever the doors do reopen, it isn't going to be a ribbon-cutting on an unchanged building. It's going to be the debut of a structure that's spent the better part of a year being taken apart, shipped out, rebuilt, and reassembled around three exhibits nobody has seen yet. For a landmark that quietly turned 150 while wrapped in construction fencing, that's a bigger story than "under construction," and it's one most people driving past on MacArthur Boulevard right now have no idea is unfolding.
If you've got a bike and live on the south end of the island, the walk or ride out to see the exterior work in progress is still worth it even with the building closed. The grounds and the beach in front of the house remain visible from the shoreline, and the St. Lucie Rocks outcropping the cottage sits on is one of the more distinctive stretches of coastline in the area regardless of what's happening with the plywood.
For the rest of the year, the Elliott Museum is the more accessible of the two, and the Tuesday garage tours are a low-key way to see a side of the collection that isn't part of the standard self-guided walk-through. Worth checking the Historical Society's own calendar of exhibits and events before you go, since hours and programming shift with the season.
Either way, the next time you drive past that scaffolding on MacArthur Boulevard, you'll know it's not paint going on. It's a building coming back together.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Hutchinson Island is actually like day to day, not just what shows up on a listing sheet, Janyne Kenworthy has spent decades working this coastline and knows which details matter once you've moved past the search portal. Let's connect.
