Late 1930's Detailed Descriptive Account of Jax and All the Rest of Fla.

[stjr]

Read all about life as it was in Old Florida when Jax at less than 150,000 people was the commerce and transportation capital of Florida and is described as a City of prosperity and great promise.  Orlando was at 30,000, in the midst of orange groves but already a favorite of tourists from the North who desire less of the beaches.  Fascinating descriptions, rich in detail, describe the lost Florida from the 1930's.  Read to your heart's desire starting with the piece on Jacksonville.  (Note that each section of the State is elaborated on the sidebar menu and, like the Upper East Coast section featuring the Jax area, has three sections enunciated at the top of the page.):

http://www.oldandsold.com/articles05/florida-ch3-1.shtml

Here is a small sample excerpt on Jax:

Like most travelers to Florida we enter the state by way of Jacksonville, the metropolis and largest city of the state, which appropriately calls itself "The Gateway City." The three great railway systems running through trains from the Northeast to Florida converge at Jacksonville, through whose Union Terminal pass more loaded passenger cars than through any other railway station in America. From Jacksonville substantially all the railway traffic of Florida radiates. It is the center of Florida's transportation web. The largest seaport in the state, through it passes a large part of the water-borne passenger traffic. The great arterial highway which parallels the Atlantic coast from Eastport, Maine, to Miami and beyond to the uttermost southern extremity of the nation, Key West, passes through Jacksonville. Along the highways passing through Jacksonville flow the fleets of busses and a high proportion of the private passenger cars, with or without trailers, in which Florida-bound tourists migrate southward. Here, in Jacksonville's harbor, one may see in the tourist season yachts of every degree, from tiny cabin cruisers to the famous and luxurious craft of the ultra-rich.

Jacksonville airport is the first stop of the through airmail planes as they speed southward from New York on their way to Miami. It is the principal terminal of the motor bus lines which cover all Florida as with a net and connect the state and the city with every other part of the country. Through the port of Jacksonville passes a large proportion of the ocean freight which originates in Florida or which is destined for Florida consumption. The latter is distributed through Jacksonville's warehouses over a trade area which includes not only all of the northern part of Florida but a large part of southern Georgia and southeastern Alabama. With the improvement of physical facilities for distribution and the increasing importance of Jacksonville as an industrial producing center, its trade territory is steadily extending in every direction. Through its three great banks, each with numerous branches strategically located in commercial centers throughout the state, Jacksonville is the financial metropolis of Florida as well as the dominant factor in the state's industrial and commercial life. It is the headquarters for most of the Federal government's activities in Florida, and of many of those of the State government.

Situated twenty-two miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, at the head of deepwater navigation on the St. Johns River, Jacksonville's history begins with the arrival, at the mouth of the St. Johns, on April 30, 1562, of Captain John Ribault, leader of a band of French Huguenots seeking refuge in America. The following morning, May l, a service of thanksgiving was held on Fort George Island. A stone column today marks the spot where this first Protestant religious service was held in America. Two years later the French established what was intended for a permanent settlement, at St. John's Bluff, a few miles up the river. Under the direction of Rene de Laudonniere they built Fort Caroline. The settlement was raided and the Huguenot colonists exterminated by a Spanish expedition from St. Augustine, on September 20, 1565........

......The railroads early cast an eye upon Fernandina, thirtysix miles northeast of Jacksonville, and with a far better deepwater natural harbor, on Cumberland Sound. The first railroad across Florida, the Florida Railroad and Navigation Company, ran from Fernandina to Cedar Key. Its builders acquired all of the waterfront in Fernandina. When Henry Al. Flagler began his railroad operations on the East Coast he planned to start from Fernandina, but the Railroad and Navigation Company refused to let him have any of their waterfront property. He built southward from Jacksonville. The result was to start Jacksonville on its upward climb to metropolitan eminence, while Fernandina declined to its former status of a fishing village. Only now is it starting toward the destiny which its favorable location on Amelia Island between Ocean and Sound has always pointed to. .......

......Returning to Jacksonville from Fernandina we encounter at the city limits a wide, well parked highway traversing what is becoming the city's chief inland recreation center, with a zoological park attractively housed among mingled palms and pines, where curious and interesting birds and beasts live in the open the year around except for shelter sheds against the rain. Even Minnie, the African elephant, needs no door to her concrete shelter. It is probably the most completely odorless zoo in the world!

The population of Jacksonville by the Florida State Census of 1935 was 148,202. This was an increase of 45,000, or nearly 43 percent, over the 1925 figures; more than double the prewar population of the 1915 census. With its increasing commercial and industrial growth, all the indications are that Jacksonville is growing at even a faster rate of acceleration. Its residential building development has difficulty in keeping pace with the demand for homes. In the heart of its downtown business center, whose wide streets are lined with shops which would do credit to any city, both in appointments and in the quality of merchandise offered, the years since the beginning of the depression have seen a larger proportionate volume of new construction of business buildings, hotels and public buildings than either New York or Philadelphia.

Jacksonville's retail trade runs above $50,000,000 a year and its wholesale business close to $150,000,000, while the value of its manufactured products is estimated at $100,000, 000. The ocean commerce of the port aggregates about three and one-half million tons a year, inbound and outbound, with a total cargo value of around $150,000,000. Jacksonville is the largest port for the distribution of petroleum products on the South Atlantic coast, second only to Savannah for the shipment of naval stores (turpentine and rosin) and first in lumber shipments. The lumber industry is one of the city's largest. Lying as it does on the very edge of the vast pine forests of Florida and Southern Georgia, Jacksonville has developed not only an enormous trade in both coastwise and foreign shipments of lumber, but a wide variety of industries based upon the utilization of this huge supply of raw material. Other important Jacksonville industries include such widely diversified items as cigars, fertilizer, chemical products, crushed oyster shell, concrete products, acetylene gas, glass bottles, storage batteries, ship and boat building, beverages, brick, palmetto fibres, coffee roasting, matches, meat packing and stockyards, upholstery and refrigeration plants.

To those has lately been added the manufacture of paper from pinewood pulp, an industry which is rapidly assuming dominant importance throughout Florida.

Unique among the world's industries is the one in Jacksonville which produces raw material for the use of hens in the manufacture of eggshells and ships its product all over the world. Underlying the marshes along the lower reaches of the St. Johns river are incalculable millions of tons of prehistoric oyster-shells, a solid bed of them more than fifty feet deep and covering many square miles. Now they are dredging these million-year-old oyster-shells, bringing them up to Jacksonville on barges, crushing and grinding them with most ingenious machinery, and selling the product by carloads and shiploads to poultry growers everywhere, to provide the lime grit which hens need to make the shells of their eggs out of it.

One of the world's largest factories, turning out a million and a half "domestic" cigars a day was established in Jacksonville because a cigar manufacturer visited Florida as a winter tourist from the North and decided he wanted to make his permanent home in the state. He picked Jacksonville for his factory site because it was the most economical spot at which to assemble tobaccos from Connecticut, New York and Ohio and from West Florida, as well as the most advantageously situated center from which to distribute the finished product.

There has never been any shortage of labor, both white and negro, in Jacksonville. All industries here, as in the rest of the state, operate under a State Factory Law which prohibits the employment of children under fourteen, and of those under sixteen unless they have a work certificate, and limiting their working hours to nine a day or fifty-four hours a week. Living costs being materially lower in the South, where the climate itself eliminates most of the expense of fuel and clothing, wages are on a lower average scale. Many of Jacksonville's industries operate on a piece-work basis. In the cigar factory, for example, which operates night and day in three eight-hour shifts, girls working full-time earn from eight to nine dollars a week, for the colored girls who operate the simplest machines, to from fifteen dollars and upward for the white operators running the more intricate wrapping and packing machinery.

Jacksonville's industrial and commercial development and its rise to unchallenged leadership among Florida's cities is not entirely due to the accident of its location. There is an aggressive, forward-looking spirit among the business men of Jacksonville, which is reflected in the management of the affairs of the city and of Duval County. Jacksonville was one of the first cities in America to establish the commission form of government. It was also one of the first to take over the ownership and operation of electric light service as a municipal function. The result is that Jacksonville not only enjoys a very low rate for electric current for industrial and domestic purposes, but the profit realized by the city from the operation of that public utility pays a high percentage of the city's operating expenses and keeps the tax rate down. Jacksonville's city bonds have never sold below par in the financial markets of the North. The city's bonded indebtedness at the end of 1937 was under $11,000,000, having been reduced more than $5,000,000 in the preceding seven years; while the assessed valuation of real estate is above $86,000,000.

In addition to its own good municipal housekeeping, Jacksonville leads almost every project for the advancement of the welfare and interests of the state as a whole. It is the head quarters of the State Chamber of Commerce, in which the local Chambers of Commerce of all Florida are federated, and which thus serves as a clearing house through which movements and enterprises of state-wide importance can be initiated, developed and put into effect. .......

.....Jacksonville's own Chamber of Commerce, a particularly well-organized and administered body of citizens, is not only especially energetic and effective in the business fields in which Chambers of Commerce customarily function, but it takes the initiative and active leadership in numerous fields where the ultimate benefit sought is the welfare of the entire state. Such an activity is the annual Fat Stock Show, held in Jacksonville every Spring under the auspices of the local Chamber of Commerce. It has proved one of the most stimulating factors in the state-wide campaign for the improvement of the grade of Florida beef cattle, thereby increasing the incomes of cattle breeders and making it worth while for the meat packing industry to establish new plants in the state. .......

[BridgeTroll]

Great beginnings... WTF happened??    Sad...

[urbanlibertarian]

^^Miami.

[civil42806]

yellow fever and YES RAIL, every thread MUST have RAIL

[stjr]

yellow fever and YES RAIL, every thread MUST have RAIL

This is the 1930's.  Yellow Fever was near the turn of the century.

Believe it or not, I posted this more for the light it shed on the quality of life in Jax and Florida at the time, than to tout rail or any other mode of transit.  The mention of rail was but a small part of the article referring to the commerce and tourism of Jax and is less noted in the account of the rest of the State.  As it is an inescapable fact that rail was fundamental to the history and development of this country and, especially, Florida, it's hard to talk about any city's growth without referencing it.

In recent times, air transit would have an added emphasis.  In fact, it could be argued that much of Jax's failure to grow like Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Miami, or Charlotte since the early 60's could be traced to our relative LACK of adequate air service unlike those golden years of the 1920's and 1930's.

Back to ancient times, and along side rail and air, today, maritime transit has always been an integral factor.  How many cities around the world correlate their development to port activity?

Add it up, and the impact of transportation on the outcome of any society is unavoidable.

[heights unknown]

Hmmmm, what a shame.  Jacksonville was the "queen" of Florida, and the talk of the State for a long time before the decline started in the 1950's.  Yeah, Miami was probably a big part of what happened to Jacksonville, that is, Miami and all other points south were newly discovered as tourists found those areas warmer, and with bigger possibilities, but our leaders back then, and up to now never saw the destruction and decline of Jacksonville coming; they failed to take the necessary or precautionary measures to keep Jacksonville "on the map" so to speak, with "great possibilities" and endless prosperity intact.  Failed management and leadership up to the present day.

Heights Unknown

[heights unknown]

yellow fever and YES RAIL, every thread MUST have RAIL

This is the 1930's.  Yellow Fever was near the turn of the century.

Believe it or not, I posted this more for the light it shed on the quality of life in Jax and Florida at the time, than to tout rail or any other mode of transit.  The mention of rail was but a small part of the article referring to the commerce and tourism of Jax and is less noted in the account of the rest of the State.  As it is an inescapable fact that rail was fundamental to the history and development of this country and, especially, Florida, it's hard to talk about any city's growth without referencing it.

In recent times, air transit would have an added emphasis.  In fact, it could be argued that much of Jax's failure to grow like Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Miami, or Charlotte since the early 60's could be traced to our relative LACK of adequate air service unlike those golden years of the 1920's and 1930's.

Back to ancient times, and along side rail and air, today, maritime transit has always been an integral factor.  How many cities around the world correlate their development to port activity?

Add it up, and the impact of transportation on the outcome of any society is unavoidable.

Nice post stjr, and I agree with it.  To add to what you have said, I really believe though that improved "air" and "rail" wasn't a huge factor in Jacksonville's demise.  If City Leaders would have had the foresight to keep the people coming (which would have equated to more business, growth in all areas of the City, etc.) airport and rail expansion would have surely followed; that is, as the population increases, prosperity and success continues and increases along with it, and the airport and the rail infrastructures have no choice but to get bigger, expand, and follow behind or even along with that success and prosperity.