Jacksonville in the Spanish-American War

Jacksonville was a training and staging town, with Springfield serving as the site of Camp Cuba Libre, the principal military base in Jacksonville in 1898.

The Camp Springfield (Cuba Libre) historical marker, placed by the Florida Department of State in 2018 at 427 East 5th Street, says the United States declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898, after the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, and that President William McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers. Camps were set up as rallying points, and on May 22 soldiers of the 2nd Division, 7th Corps of the U.S. Volunteers arrived in Jacksonville under Major General Fitzhugh Lee and Colonel William Jennings Bryan.

The National Register nomination for the Springfield Historic District gives the Army's side: Florida became the training ground and embarkation point for American soldiers, the Army chose Jacksonville for a training camp, and on May 21, 1898, Brigadier General H. W. Lawton selected Springfield as the site. The first troops, the 2nd Illinois and 1st Wisconsin regiments, arrived on May 22.

The camp began in Springfield, along the railroad north of downtown Jacksonville, and spread to Panama Park and Fairfield as more regiments arrived.

The Springfield nomination places the camp along the east side of the Jacksonville and Fernandina railroad tracks, between 3rd and 8th Streets and west of Ionia Street. The state marker stands on the camp of the 1st North Carolina Volunteers. The name came early: the nomination says that on June 4 General Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, named the camp Cuba Libre, and the marker says it was originally Camp Springfield.

A souvenir booklet issued in 1898 by The Florida Times Union and Citizen, held in the Richard Mette Collection at the University of North Florida, describes the layout: nine regiments of the Second Division in Springfield, seven in Panama Park and six in Fairfield. The nomination adds that in 1898 the Springfield Company deeded forty acres along Hogans Creek to the city for a park, completed as Springfield Park, now Klutho Park, by 1901.

Official Jacksonville sources put the camp at almost 29,000 to nearly 30,000 men, spread over more than twenty regiments.

The three Jacksonville figures are not the same measure: the marker gives a count for August, the nomination a total of regiments stationed over several months, and the 1898 booklet a list of 22 regiments by camp area. This page reports all three rather than choosing one.

Life at the Jacksonville camp meant scarce supplies, waiting and the constant threat of typhoid, which the Springfield nomination blames mainly on low ground.

The marker says that by August supplies were scarce and typhoid was a constant threat, and that Army physician Major Walter Reed visited the camp to study the origins and transmission of typhoid. The Springfield nomination says typhoid fever broke out in July, due mainly to the low ground the camp occupied. On July 29 the Wisconsin regiment moved to higher ground near 5th and Silver Streets, and other regiments moved to the Phoenix Park or Panama areas.

Among those stationed in Jacksonville, the nomination notes, was William Jennings Bryan, then commander of the 3rd Nebraska Regiment and a three-time Democratic candidate for president. The marker says most of the volunteers at the camp never saw combat.

Jacksonville's Cuban ties came through its cigar factories, where independence leader Jose Marti spoke, and through a Jacksonville tug that carried arms to Cuban revolutionaries.

The National Register nomination for the El Modelo Block at 513 W. Bay Street says that in 1895 there were fifteen cigar factories in Jacksonville producing more than 6,000,000 cigars a year, and that the El Modelo Cigar Manufacturing Company, managed and later owned by Gabriel Hidalgo Gato, was the largest, employing 225 men in 1885 with an annual payroll of about $147,000. Marti, founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, spoke at El Modelo on December 23, 1893, on one of eight trips to Jacksonville to raise money for Cuban independence. The nomination calls Jacksonville one of the major centers of Cuban revolutionary activity in Florida and says Gato's brother-in-law, Jose Alejandro Huau, helped arrange the visits.

The Pilot Town and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward marker on Heckscher Drive says Broward, a bar pilot elected to the Jacksonville City Council in 1895, built the seagoing tug Three Friends with his brother that year. On its maiden voyage in 1896 it carried munitions and Cuban expatriates to Cuba, and, encouraged by Jacksonville's Cuban community, Broward commanded it on eight voyages through Spanish blockades while pursued by U.S. authorities. In 1897 the tug turned to peacetime freight and passenger work. Broward was elected governor in 1905, the state's 19th, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1910 but died before taking office.

The Springfield camp closed on January 11, 1899, and the neighborhood that replaced it is now the Springfield Historic District.

The marker says some of the volunteers sailed for Havana aboard the Roumanian on December 7, 1898, that fighting ceased with the Treaty of Paris on December 10, and that the next day those volunteers became the first U.S. Volunteers to set foot in an independent Cuba. The Springfield nomination says Springfield served as a camp until it was finally closed on January 11, 1899.

Springfield's next chapter came quickly. The nomination says the Great Jacksonville Fire of May 3, 1901, burned 466 acres and 146 city blocks downtown but was stopped at Hogans Creek, so Springfield was spared and became the focal point of rebuilding. The El Modelo Block on Bay Street was one of the few commercial buildings to survive that fire, its own nomination says. The 1898 souvenir booklet of camp scenes remains in the UNF collection.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, from the Camp Springfield and Pilot Town state marker records, the National Register nominations for the Springfield Historic District and the El Modelo Block, and the University of North Florida catalog record for the 1898 camp booklet.