Jacksonville: The Bold City

The place where Jacksonville now stands was called Cowford when it was first settled in seventeen ninety-one, named for a narrow bend in the Saint Johns River where cattle were driven across the water. Spain still owned Florida then. When the United States acquired the territory in eighteen twenty-one and named Andrew Jackson the first military governor, settlers rechristened the river crossing in his honor, and Jacksonville was founded in eighteen twenty-two, incorporated a decade later in eighteen thirty-two.

The city changed hands four times during the Civil War, a symptom of its strategic value: the Saint Johns River gave Union gunboats direct access to the Florida interior, and Jacksonville served as the Confederate Army's primary supplier of Florida cattle and pork. The war left the city damaged but not destroyed.

Then came May third, nineteen-oh-one. A spark from a chimney ignited a pile of drying Spanish moss at a mattress factory on the corner of Beaver and Davis Streets, and the fire swept across one hundred forty-six blocks of downtown Jacksonville in a single afternoon, destroying over two thousand three hundred sixty buildings and leaving ten thousand people homeless. Seven people were killed. It was the largest urban fire in the American Southeast and, at the time, the third largest in United States history, behind only the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake fire.

Jacksonville rebuilt quickly, and throughout the twentieth century it sprawled across northeastern Florida with remarkable speed. In October of nineteen sixty-eight, the city and Duval County merged their governments in a consolidation vote, creating a single unified municipality covering eight hundred forty-one square miles, making Jacksonville the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States, a distinction it still holds today.