In one of those sad coincidences, the building that once served as home to one of Auburn’s iconic figures from the past is to be demolished Saturday – just as the building Dr. J.C. Hawver once had his office in is being opened as a medical museum less than a mile away.

Fate and time brings this ironic “birth” and “death” together within days of one another.

The Gold Country Medical History Museum has its opening ceremony at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Maple Street building in Old Town Auburn. It housed Placer County’s first public hospital and later was occupied by the dental office of one J.C. Hawver.

An Auburn dentist, Hawver dedicated much of his later years to exploring a limestone cave on the lip of the middle fork of the American River canyon – a cave that would unearth the remains of 12 extinct mammal species and six extinct bird species.

Hawver sent most of his finds to the University of California at Berkeley, where the fossils remain to this day in the collection of the Anthropology Department’s Hearst Museum.

This past week, a crew moved into an overgrown patch of land adjacent to the In-N-Out Burgers parking lot off Highway 49 to clear brush and trees. Revealed as the clearing continued were the brittle remains of a house Hawver lived in for several years before dying of a heart attack in 1914 at age 60.

The house itself has been boarded up and outbuildings, including a chicken coup, barn and what looks like a viewing tower, appear to have been built at the turn of the 19th century or even earlier. They’ll be torn down to make way for an extension of the fast-food restaurant’s parking lot.

Hawver’s local legacy is the discovery of a rich cache of fossilized bird and mammal bones that date back at least 10,000 years. Self taught in science and nature studies, Hawver was sought out in 1906 by three local boys who had managed to climb 80 feet down to the cave floor. One of the boys had slipped and grabbed onto a fossil bone. Shining a candle on the wall, he had discovered bone fragments and a large vertebra in the rock.

Hawver would work between 1906 and 1913 in the face of repeated vandalism to remove fossils from the cave, collaborating with nationally renowned experts but receiving little in the way of compensation.

One of the first members of the Native Sons of the Golden West and an early Auburn school board trustee, Hawver would suffer his share of tragedy.

He blew off most of his left thumb and index finger using the wrong chemicals while taking photos of a cave near Placerville in 1907. Four years later, his wife would die after he dress caught fire while their granddaughter was playing with Christmas candles.

Hawver would marry again and lived in Auburn until his death.

The family-owned burger chain isn’t going to completely ignore the legacy of the site. They’ve been working on a plan to place a plaque on a boulder at the site.