By the late 1800s Jacksonville was the largest city in Florida, a busy river port shipping timber and cotton and a winter resort billed as a "Winter City in a Summer Land." Then came the Great Fire of May 3, 1901 — one of the largest urban fires in American history, which leveled the downtown in eight hours. The rebuild made the city. Klutho's Prairie School towers rose from the ashes, and within a few years Jacksonville reinvented itself again, this time on film.
Our Jacksonville design carries the Florida alligator beneath an arched JACKSONVILLE and the line Florida Territory · Est. 1845, printed in a black, woodcut-style mark. The alligator is old Florida itself — the river-and-swamp country the city grew out of — and the 1845 date marks Florida statehood. It is a River City emblem: not the tourist Florida of postcards, but the lived-in city on the river that runs north.
Why People Visit Jacksonville, FL
Jacksonville rewards travelers who like a city that surprises them: Prairie School architecture in the Deep South, a river that flows north to the sea, miles of Atlantic beach, and a deep Navy heritage at Mayport and NAS Jacksonville. It is a lived-in River City, not a postcard — and that is the appeal.
