Andrew Anderson (St. Augustine, Florida)

Dr. Andrew Anderson II (March 13, 1839 in St. Augustine, Florida – December 2, 1924 in St. Augustine) was a physician, philanthropist, mayor and benefactor of St. Augustine, Florida. Anderson commissioned multiple works of art to adorn a variety of public spaces in the City of St. Augustine, including the two Medici lion statues places at the approach to the famed Bridge of Lions.

Anderson was the son of New York physician Dr. Andrew Anderson I an 1813 graduate of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons. His father arrived in St. Augustine in 1829 aboard the schooner General Jackson along with his mother Mary and two sisters Hannah and Emily. Within a few years the elder Anderson had become a pillar of the community. In 1830 he was elected head of the local temperance society, St. Augustine alderman in 1833 and 1834, a justice of the peace and an elder of the Presbyterian Church in 1839.

The elder Anderson's first wife Mary Anderson died on September 8, 1837. In 1838 he married Clarissa Cochrane Fairbanks a widow from New Hampshire. Their son Andrew Anderson II was born in 1839. In the same year his father laid the cornerstone for what would eventually become the Markland Mansion on the plantation he owned on land between the San Sebastian River and Maria Sanchez Creek. Soon after beginning construction on Markland his father perished in a yellow fever outbreak which had struck St. Augustine.

Anderson and his family moved into a scaled back version of Markland in 1841. After attending receiving his preliminary schooling in St. Augustine, Anderson attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts between 1853 - 1854 then switched to a private school in Paris, France.

Upon returning to the United States he entered Princeton University then during the Civil War he escaped from Florida and went to New York where he entered medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.

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