Oma Cross and the Curiosities of St. Petersburg

For decades, Oma Cross served as a driving force behind the collections of the St. Petersburg Historical Society, later known as the St. Petersburg Museum of History. As curator, she guarded a curious assortment of artifacts that included a mummy, death masks, and even a six-legged calf.

Some visitors expected little more than “old stuffed owls,” she joked, but Cross insisted there was always something inside the museum that could not be seen anywhere else. Antiques were her passion. “Without an understanding of the past, there’s no basis to build for the future,” she often said.

Born Oma Martha Baker in Washta, Iowa, in 1900, she walked four miles to school and played piano for silent films at age twelve for five dollars a week. After visiting St. Petersburg with her parents in 1917, she returned permanently with her husband, Cecil Cross, arriving by car in the early 1920s.

With just twenty dollars, Cross opened her own antique shop on Central Avenue in 1931. The building was so weathered, she later said, you could throw a cat through the holes in its walls. Her love of history soon led to decades of work preserving artifacts and inspiring generations of young visitors to care about the past.