Forgotten Neighborhoods from Jacksonville’s Past

Jacksonville is blessed with a number of noteworthy historic neighborhoods – Springfield, Riverside, Murray Hill, Mandarin, and LaVilla are just a few standouts.

The city has gotten much better at honoring its history in recent years, with placards and monuments explaining the history and context of certain neighborhoods or properties. But there are still parts of the city whose pasts are a lot less celebrated.

And some of its historic neighborhoods haven’t even survived to be part of today’s narrative.

Few remnants remain today of certain historic neighborhoods that were lost to redevelopment or some other fate, putting them at risk of being permanently forgotten.

Here are a few of those old neighborhoods and the details still remembered about them today.

Oklahoma

Long before Baptist Health and Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital took over the western portion of the Southbank, it was home to a small community known as Oklahoma.

Oklahoma began as land used for plantations owned by the Hendricks and Hudnall families. When landowners Isaac Hendricks and Elizabeth Hudnall got married, a powerful familial alliance was formed resulting in the merger of their properties.

After the Civil War, the plantations were broken up for redevelopment. The family sold off part of their land to be developed as the new town of South Jacksonville, but it kept the western portion to be utilized as a farming-oriented community which became Oklahoma.

The neighborhood grew alongside South Jacksonville, soon abandoning its farming roots and developing subdivisions. It was annexed by Jacksonville in the late 1930s, not long after South Jacksonville was annexed, and the two gradually became merged and referred to collectively by the name of the area’s most prominent commercial district: San Marco.

Today, while remnants of South Jacksonville such as its former city hall building are still present, there’s very little left to indicate that Oklahoma ever existed.

Sugar Hill

North of LaVilla and west of Springfield, a neighborhood called Sugar Hill was once home to some of the city’s most affluent black residents.

The area was developed in the 1880s as an upscale suburb for black Jaxsons during the days of segregation. It boasted many prominent residents including Abraham Lincoln Lewis, founder of Afro-American Life Insurance Company and American Beach.

Like LaVilla, it was a lively center of black culture for many years. But when Interstate 95 was developed in Jax, its path ended up running straight through the Sugar Hill neighborhood, removing several residential properties and effectively cutting the neighborhood in half.

Most of the residents who weren’t displaced by the initial construction ended up moving elsewhere anyway, and what remained of Sugar Hill was further decimated by the continued expansion of what’s now UF Health’s campus at the edge of Springfield.

Nowadays, what was once considered Sugar Hill has largely been absorbed into the surrounding neighborhoods of LaVilla, Springfield, and Brentwood. The memory of the neighborhood lives on with a few of its old buildings as well as a mosaic installed under the I-95 overpass along the S-Trail.

Yukon

Yukon, or Youkon as it’s sometimes spelled in old city records, was a small town of around 1,000 residents developed along the Ortega River just south of Ortega.

Unlike the other entries, it was never officially a Jacksonville neighborhood. But it likely would have become part of Jax had it survived through consolidation.

Instead, Yukon was essentially told to stop being a town by the U.S. military, which was nervous about the town’s proximity to NAS Jacksonville which was established on the opposite side of Roosevelt Boulevard in the 1940s.

Residents were forced to move from the town’s main subdivision, which became property of the federal government. Much of that former subdivision is now a foliage-covered part of Tillie K. Fowler Regional Park, which opened on the land in the ‘80s.

Some of Yukon’s old buildings are still around, like Yukon Baptist Church and Murray’s Tavern. The old Yukon post office building is still standing at 120^th Street and Yukon Road – it was even still in operation until the turn of the millennium.

But the remnants seen today are a far cry from the small town’s peak.

Silvertown

Established around the same time as Riverside, the Silvertown neighborhood was a small subsection located right along what was then the western border of Jacksonville.

According to Jacksonville Historical Society, the neighborhood was developed by local grocer and investor August Buesing. And indeed, early maps show what appears to be an “August Street” as part of the neighborhood.

Buesing intended for Silvertown to serve as something of an annex to the mostly-black Brooklyn neighborhood, providing additional residential opportunities for black residents on the outskirts of mostly-white Riverside.

Over the years, however, Riverside kept growing and expanding around Silvertown, eventually enveloping it and effectively making it a small black neighborhood within Riverside. As segregation ended and its original families gradually moved elsewhere, the area has become essentially identical to the rest of Riverside. Its original streets were incorporated into Riverside’s grid; a portion of what’s now King Street runs through what was once Silvertown and, along with what are now known as Myra Street and Dellwood Avenue, offers views of some of the few remaining residential and commercial buildings from that era.