Once US One touches the south bank of the St. Johns River, the history becomes personal. Probably a lot of what I am- who I am- is defined by growing up in the south side of Jacksonville. Coming off the Main Street Bridge, following the route of US One also becomes much more challenging. Anyone headed south on the highway these days assumes that in following the expressway west to Philips Highway, they are on US One. But before there was an expressway, before there was a Philips Highway, even before there was a Main Street Bridge, US One was here in San Marco.

The best place to get a sense of what eighty years of progress has done to change the face of the city is in St. Johns River Park. Curving along the riverbank, literally under the bridge itself, the park was created in 1965. It's been expanded considerably since then, but no one I know calls it anything but Friendship Park. Only the fountain at its center was ever named "Friendship", but for the last two generations of Southsiders, it was ground zero on Friday night. The entire San Marco area has something of a reputation as a neighborhood that has inspired and attracted artists and musicians, culture and counterculture for over three decades. These days, the eclectic mix of 30's, 40's and 50's architecture is being revitalized, the parks and sculptures renovated and San Marco is reinventing itself for a new century, without losing touch with the last.

Standing at the edge of the river, you can scan the horizon counterclockwise and see the march of history. It helps to see it through my eyes, my memories of what was there. In 1904, before the creation of the national highway system, the Kings Road took travelers to the north bank of the St. Johns and ferries would transport them over to South Jacksonville, a separate city, with its own government and police force. Then, in the summer of 1921, everything changed. A modern iron bridge, completed on June 27th of that year now connected the two cities, slowly knitting them into one by 1932. With the advent of numbered highways and the Dixie Route, motorists could follow US One over the new St. Johns River Bridge (eventually renamed the Acosta Bridge) into what would become San Marco and on to the old St. Augustine Road (Kings Road). Within five or six years, the ferries had stopped running, unable to compete with the new roadway that allowed more people to cross the river in less time.

The Main Street Bridge (in 1958 it was renamed the Alsop Bridge) would not span the river until 1941 but once that happened, the route of US One shifted again to follow a more direct path. Motor traffic would come down Main Street going over the "new" bridge, loop eastward around San Marco and be deposited onto Miami Road (now Philips Highway). Sixty years later, an interstate, several banks, an insurance company and a hospital have all but obliterated this piece of Jacksonville history. You have to look hard to find the old places. My advantage is that I saw much of this area built. The 1921 St. Johns River/Acosta Bridge was still standing when I was a teenager. (The new one wasn't completed until 1998.) The old Fuller-Warren Bridge that now carries traffic on I-95 over the St. Johns into San Marco was built in my lifetime. (Originally called the Gilmore Street Bridge, it was rebuilt in 2002.) Even the interstate did not exist in my childhood. I saw this place, once called Hendricks Point, almost as my mother had, when she grew up here in the 30's and 40's. There were still a few open fields and you could be four blocks away from the river and still see across to the other side. No more.

To follow US One today, you have to get off the expressway at the foot of the bridge and follow the signs to Prudential Drive. This is one of those streets that came with the building of the Prudential Insurance Company's southern headquarters at the end of Hendricks Point in the early 1960's. The original route is partly under the expressway now and part of it still exists as Riverplace Boulevard (one block north), but I'm following the signs where they are. It's just as well, because it gives me a chance to visit an old friend.

At the beginning of the last century, a large grassy field along the south bank of the river was the focal point of many south Jacksonville community gatherings. The centerpiece of this little meadow was a huge tree generally referred to as the Great Oak. On an adjacent baseball diamond, Babe Ruth once played in an exhibition game and John Phillips Sousa brought his band to play a concert, perhaps shading themselves afterwards under the huge branches of the live oak that was already a century old by then. Much later, when "progress" threatened the meadow and its majestic oak, a local newspaper reporter made up a story to save it. He wrote that the tree had historical significance because a treaty had once been signed between the Seminoles and the whites under those leafy branches. Even when I was in elementary school, we knew the tree as Treaty Oak. It was a benign lie, or rather an undocumented version of history, but it did accomplish what he set out to do. The oak still survives, now certainly over 200 years old, hidden in a small park that is surrounded by huge multistory hotels. It is unbelievably massive, with a trunk that measures 25 feet in diameter at the base. Thanks to the generosity of the DuPont family, it may live another hundred years in Treaty Oak Park.

At Prudential Drive and Hendricks Avenue, there is signage indicating the route of US One follows US 90, but armed with my mother's memories, I know that the old US One is actually one block further, at Kings Avenue. The original Kings Road came down to the river on what is now Liberty Street in downtown Jacksonville. Ferried across the St. Johns, they would have landed near the intersection where the US One highway sign is today. But Hendricks Avenue would not exist until the dawn of the twentieth century, and so it is the Kings Road I am following south now. Where it emerges from the south bank of the river, it is called Kings Avenue, but then this road has many names.

It is all but impossible to catalog every place in San Marco that figures in my life story. My mother grew up here, went to school here, attended church here. My wife's father was born and raised just two blocks from where my mother lived. I went to the same high school my mother graduated from. From 1970 to 1974, I had four different apartments here. I have a continuous unbroken acquaintance with this neighborhood that dates back to some of my earliest memories. I can recite almost block by block the events and history, the changes that so many years have worked and the people who are gone but once populated my world. At times, it is difficult to see the sharp edges of the present, obscured as it is by the shades of the past. It is like viewing two overlapping photographs of the same place, taken years apart. It is disconcerting, even haunting at times, but it is a gift and just as often, I find it vaguely comforting to be able to cross back and forth between the shadows and the light.

US One becomes Philips Highway just beyond Olevia Street, where my grandmother lived. From here, it is a straight line 35 miles to my current home in St. Augustine. To be sure, the King's Road veers off now and again (notably at Old St. Augustine Road), but US One strikes unswervingly south in geometric precision, paralleled by the railroad tracks that are never far from sight. On this side of the river, the tracks are owned by the Florida East Coast Railway, a distinction that means little these days. At the time my grandfather bought a house here, it meant considerably more. During the golden era of Florida railroading, the FEC line was in bitter competition with arch-rival Atlantic Coast Line. Edgar Wheeler was an ACL man, a sergeant with the company police force. Armed with a nightstick and a .32 caliber revolver, he wandered the train yards at night, watching for petty thieves and hobos. So it is somewhat satisfying to me that I have lived over half my life within earshot of the sound of freight trains, rumbling through the darkness, signaling the crossings with that low mournful wail- two short, one long, two short. I like to think of it as a continuity of that heritage, a small remembrance of a time when the railroad was part of the family.

These days, most of the car dealerships and motels that used to line Philips Highway north have moved further out- to Baymeadows and beyond. Private schools and auto repair shops have taken over the properties, creating a very different feel to my old neighborhood. On a nondescript street just before what used to be Philips Highway Plaza, on the west side of US One, are the remains of what was once a neat, well-maintained blue-collar subdivision. Severed by the construction of I-95 and hemmed in by the shopping plaza to the south, it feels positively claustrophobic now, but fifty years ago, this was suburban utopia. Most of the houses are either concrete block or wood frame with shingle siding, with the occasional brick ranch style house here and there. When my parents moved in, this neighborhood was on the edge of town and many tracts remained wooded. In fact, you would have had to enter the subdivision from the opposite side, since pine woods separated Belair Road from Stonemont Street. Almost nothing remains of the place I knew as a child. The yards seem overgrown and the houses are getting shabby. Recent construction has made my old street a dirt road, completing the disillusionment. I know now I will not return here again.

Before consolidation, the city limits were just a block or so from where I called home. Even though it is difficult now to define the southern boundary of metropolitan Jacksonville since urban sprawl has reached out almost to the county line, my eyes can see the old divisions we once recognized. Beyond Emerson Street, there were only a few businesses. Some still survive, like a large strip club and the Gator Lodge motel. New office parks sit atop what used to be pastures and pine woods all the way out to Bowden, which only survives on a street sign. Bowden was another of those small communities that didn't make it into the second half of the twentieth century. The Bowden family was once fairly prominent in South Jacksonville before the annexation. Ironically, I enjoy a distant connection to this piece of history, since my wife's grandmother was a Bowden. Somewhere on Bowden Road, a spot is marked with a small plaque that identifies the family farm, but a more enduring legacy is the fact that the railroad still refers to their switchyard here as the Bowden Yard.

It's not until you reach the hamlet of Bayard that you begin to glimpse open country. Another place that sprang up along the Kings Road around 1800, the town reputedly got it's name from Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard. It's more likely (as local lore has it) that the name came from Bayard Clinch, son of General Duncan Lamont Clinch, who was a hero of the Seminole wars. The old Wing Hotel still stands along the Kings Road, one hundred and five years later, but it's much the worse for wear. It has been everything from a general store to a whorehouse but one day, twenty-first century economics will do what neglect, termites and exposure to the semi-tropical climate of northeast Florida could not. Incredibly, the building was refused historic status, even though it remains almost entirely intact as it was built.

One block south on the same side of the highway are the remains of Horne's Beautyrest Cabins, a "tourist court" that welcomed travelers along US One in the 30's and 40's. Time has been even less kind to this Bayard landmark. When the highway was widened, it clipped off the front half of the office and the pine woods have all but reclaimed the cabins themselves. Horne also worked for Stuckey's, who had a store just down the road from his motel. Before he was through, Horne created an entire chain of Horne's restaurants to challenge his former employers. An abandoned Horne's sits along the highway just past the St. Johns County line, and I make a note to stop for a photo-op.

Bayard has one other claim to infamy in that it has long been recognized as a very effective speed trap. Jacksonville police sit in empty lots and do the radar checks these days, but long before that, the Florida Highway Patrol and the Duval County Sheriff's Office wrote a mountain of tickets. On the other hand, this somewhat schizophrenic town also has one of the most popular biker bars between downtown Jacksonville and downtown St. Augustine. (Not surprisingly, it is also the only bar along the forty mile route.) But Reni's Rooster Saloon usually only sees a lot of traffic on the weekends- Sunday, especially. Often, it's busier next door at Concrete Creations, where you can buy almost anything in the way of concrete yard ornaments. This is not your typical bunny/gnome/birdbath outlet. I once saw a full-size alligator (that I really want for my back yard) and a life-size grizzly. One of the eeriest pieces is a slightly larger-than-life Viet Nam era soldier, cast in colored concrete, frozen on patrol for eternity.

It is almost sunset by the time I reach the county line at Racetrack Road. I am ready to go home, or at least to the place where I live now. Across Durbin Creek, US One climbs a low rise to Palm Valley Road. Once, this marked the halfway point between south Jacksonville and St. Augustine. In another twenty years, Jacksonville will have consumed Bayard and will stand here at the border, hungry for more.

Update: 12/10/2004 - The main office and remaining cabins of Horne's Beautyrest tourist court have been bulldozed.

Update: 4/27/05 - I received an email from a reader who was in a unique position to correct some of the history I quoted on Hornes......... "My name is Gloria Horne and I am the daughter of the Hornes you are talking about. My dad nor my brother never worked for Stuckeys; my dad was a friend of the older Stuckey. The abandoned store you are talking about just before you go into St. Johns County is not a Horne's store, it was a place called Johnsons, copying my dad's stores. The main office of Hornes is still located in Bayard on the south end of Bayard. Someone else bought the building, not sure of the name of the company. (ed. note: BFE moved into this location but has abandoned it now) The building just south of the Wing place was a restaurant owned by my aunt. We moved from Bayard in 1947. I did not know they were tearing down the Wing building. That is sad. When the Wings lived there, it was a post office at one time. My dad and brother sold the Bayard locations, the motel and main office, and sold the Horne stores to Greyhound Bus Company, and then don't know who had them- they just seemed to go down as they were not on the interstates."

Update: 5/5/05 - The Old Country Store in Bayard (the former Wing Hotel) has been demolished. Wreckers began stripping the building April 10th and finally collapsed the structure three weeks later.

Update: 5/30/05 - The original Horne's headquarters (last occupied by BFE) has also been demolished. With this, nearly every structure associated with Bayard's early 20th century history is now gone.

Update: 11/17/07 - BLMNov2001 writes: "For the last 40 years, Hornes's Beauty Rest Cabins have been Bayard Antique Village. The cabins are still there, perhaps moved away from Philips Hwy. They are on a u-shaped driveway. On December 8th there will be a 40th anniversary celebration."

Lebaronjlm wrote to add: "Since 1967, those cabins were turned into Bayard Antique Village and Flea Market [owned by] the Searcy's. Mr. James Moore purchased it from the Searcy family [in] 1998 and [it]continues today as Bayard Antique Village and Flea Market."