Jacksonville

Jacksonville is a port city in northeastern Florida, on the St. Johns River near the point where it reaches the Atlantic. It carries the name of Andrew Jackson, the first military governor of the Florida Territory and later president of the United States.

René Goulaine de Laudonnière built Fort Caroline for a French Huguenot colony on the river bluffs in 1564, and a reconstruction of it stands in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. Cow Ford, a cattle crossing on the narrow part of the river, was laid out as a town by the merchant Isaiah Hart in 1822. A great fire in the early 1900s cleared the downtown, and the architect Henry John Klutho rebuilt much of it in the Prairie School style. In the 1910s the city drew silent film studios from New York with its mild winters. The city and Duval County merged into one government in the late 1960s.

CSX, the freight railroad of the eastern United States, has its head office in Jacksonville. Johnson & Johnson Vision makes Acuvue contact lenses at its plant in the city. JAXPORT, the port on the St. Johns River, ships new cars to and from overseas and runs container lines to Puerto Rico.

The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, set in the riverside garden of a lumber family's former home, holds European and American paintings and a large collection of Meissen porcelain. Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band of Sweet Home Alabama, formed in Jacksonville in the 1960s. The Jacksonville Jaguars joined the NFL in the 1990s, and their stadium hosts the yearly college football game between Florida and Georgia.