The river carried every earlier chapter. The Timucua lived along the lower St. Johns for thousands of years, in villages among the marshes and live oaks. Jean Ribault’s French expedition entered the river’s mouth on May 1, 1562 and raised a stone column; two years later René de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline on the bluff — a French Huguenot colony a year older than St. Augustine, and among the first European settlements in what is now the United States. The colonists marked their landing with a feast of thanksgiving in June 1564 — a fair claim to the first Thanksgiving on American soil. Spain took the colony by force in 1565, and the contact era devastated the Timucua — losses the river’s story owes its first honesty to. Under the British the shallow crossing became Cow Ford — Wacca Pilatka to the Seminole — and in 1822 Isaiah Hart platted a town there, named for Andrew Jackson, first military governor of the Florida Territory. It was chartered as a city in 1832. Union forces occupied the young city four times during the Civil War — the Olustee campaign of 1864 marched west from here — before the peace brought the steamboats.
The Gilded Age made the river a resort. Steamboats worked the St. Johns and winter visitors filled grand hotels — Jacksonville sold itself as the Winter City in a Summer Land — until the fire of 1901 reset the town, and the rebuilt city found a stranger industry: the movies. Between 1908 and 1922 more than thirty silent-film studios set up along the river, drawn south by mild winters and long light, and Jacksonville called itself the Winter Film Capital of the World — Hollywood before Hollywood claimed the title. The studios eventually went west, but the era left its mark in Arlington, where one silent-era studio complex survives as a National Historic Landmark.
Why People Visit Jacksonville Florida
- Look up at the Laura Street Trio and the St. James Building downtown — the Prairie School rebuild of 1901 standing in straight modern lines.
- Walk both Riverwalks past Friendship Fountain, with the skyline across the north-flowing St. Johns.
- Stand under the Treaty Oak on the Southbank — a live oak centuries older than the city around it.
- Spend a beach day at Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, or Atlantic Beach — the barrier islands are inside the city limits.
- Visit Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Timucuan Preserve for the French colony of 1564, the river marshes the Timucua knew, and the preserved, sobering history at Kingsley Plantation.
- Photograph the fallen giants of Boneyard Beach on Big Talbot Island, and swim at Little Talbot or Hanna Park.
- Ride the tiny St. Johns River Ferry at Mayport and eat local shrimp where the boats come in.
- Browse the historic districts — San Marco’s 1920s square, Five Points, Riverside-Avondale’s leafy streets, Springfield’s restored blocks, and Mandarin on the river — where Harriet Beecher Stowe wintered and wrote.
- Catch the LaVilla story downtown, where the Harlem of the South once rang with jazz and blues.