Hollywood before Hollywood. Between 1908 and 1922 more than thirty silent-film studios set up along the river, and Jacksonville called itself the Winter Film Capital of the World. The mild winters and river light drew the cameras south years before California claimed them; Norman Studios, in the Arlington neighborhood, survives today as a National Historic Landmark. A few blocks away, the LaVilla district became known as the Harlem of the South — a center of Black business, jazz, and blues, and the boyhood home of writer and civil-rights leader James Weldon Johnson.
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.
