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.
Jacksonville sits at a bend in the St. Johns River, on ground the Timucua people knew long before Europeans arrived. The French built Fort Caroline near the river's mouth in 1564, one of the earliest European settlements in what is now the United States. The British called the low river crossing the Cow Ford. In 1822 the town was platted and named for Andrew Jackson, Florida's first territorial governor, and Florida entered the Union as a state in 1845 — the date the city's alligator emblem still carries.
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.
