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.
The Navy settled the river in the 1940s — Naval Air Station Jacksonville in 1940, Naval Station Mayport at the river’s mouth in 1942 — and shipyards worked around the clock through the war; the carriers and the naval air overhead have been part of the city’s weather ever since. In 1968 Jacksonville and Duval County consolidated into a single government, and the city woke up the largest by land area in the contiguous United States: room enough inside the limits for the Atlantic beaches — off which the North Atlantic right whale, the most endangered of the great whales, comes to calve each winter — 80,000 acres of parks, the centuries-old Treaty Oak on the Southbank, Friendship Fountain facing the skyline, and the cable-stayed sweep of the Dames Point Bridge downriver.
Why People Visit Jacksonville Florida
Jacksonville offers a Prairie School downtown no one expects in the South, a great river running the wrong way to the sea, beaches without the resort crowds, live oaks and marsh preserves, shrimp boats and naval carriers sharing one river mouth, and neighborhoods that kept their bones. Visitors come for the beaches, the river, the architecture, the parks, and the easy room of the biggest city in America. On the St. Johns since 1822.