page_title: Jacksonville, Florida
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Jacksonville, Florida / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: Excerpt of Northeast Florida from Bernard Romans' 1776 map of Florida
context_page_description: Jacksonville is the most populous city in Florida, and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States as of 2020. It is the seat of Duval County, with which the city government consolidated in 1968. Consolidation gave Jacksonville its great size and placed most of its metropolitan population within the city limits. As of 2019, Jacksonville's population was estimated to be 911,507, making it the 12th most populous city in the U.S., the most populous city in the Southeast, and the most populous city in the South outside of the state of Texas. The Jacksonville metropolitan area has a population of 1,523,615 and is the fourth largest metropolitan area in Florida.
  Jacksonville is centered on the banks of the St. Johns River in the First Coast region of northeast Florida, about 25 miles south of the Georgia state line and 328 miles north of Miami. The Jacksonville Beaches communities are along the adjacent Atlantic coast. The area was originally inhabited by the Timucua people, and in 1564 was the site of the French colony of Fort Caroline, one of the earliest European settlements in what is now the continental United States.
context_section_description: The area of the modern city of Jacksonville has been inhabited for thousands of years. On Black Hammock Island in the national Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, a University of North Florida team discovered some of the oldest remnants of pottery in the United States, dating to 2500 BC.
  In the 16th century, the beginning of the historical era, the region was inhabited by the Mocama, a coastal subgroup of the Timucua people. At the time of contact with Europeans, all Mocama villages in present-day Jacksonville were part of the powerful chiefdom known as the Saturiwa, centered around the mouth of the St. Johns River. One early French map shows a village called Ossachite at the site of what is now downtown Jacksonville; this may be the earliest recorded name for that area.
  In 1562, French Huguenot explorer Jean Ribault charted the St. Johns River, calling it the River of May because that was the month of his discovery. Ribault erected a stone column at his landing site near the river's mouth, claiming the newly discovered land for France. In 1564, René Goulaine de Laudonnière established the first European settlement on the St. Johns River, Fort Caroline, near the main village of the Saturiwa.
  Philip II of Spain ordered Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to protect the interests of Spain by attacking the French at Fort Caroline. On September 20, 1565, a Spanish force from the nearby Spanish settlement of St. Augustine attacked Fort Caroline, and killed nearly all the French soldiers defending it. The Spanish renamed the fort as San Mateo and, following the expulsion of the French, St. Augustine became the most important European settlement in Florida. The location of Fort Caroline is subject to debate, but a reconstruction of the fort was established in 1964 along the St. Johns River.
  Spain ceded Florida to the British in 1763 after its victory against the French in the Seven Years' War (known as the French and Indian War on the North American front). The British soon constructed the King's Road connecting St. Augustine to Georgia. The road crossed the St. Johns River at a narrow point, which the Seminole called Wacca Pilatka and the British called the Cow Ford; these names reflected the use of the ford for moving cattle across the river there.
  The British introduced the cultivation of sugar cane, indigo and fruits as commodity crops, in addition to exporting lumber. These crops were labor-intensive and the British imported more enslaved Africans to work the plantations that were developed. The planters in northeastern Florida began to prosper economically.
  After being defeated in the American Revolutionary War, Britain returned control of this territory to Spain in 1783. The settlement at the Cow Ford continued to grow.
caption: Northeast Florida showing Cow Ford (center) from Bernard Romans' 1776 map of Florida
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