Jacksonville Beach (city)

No. Jacksonville Beach is its own incorporated city inside Duval County, with its own mayor, council, City Hall and city manager. The City of Jacksonville Beach explains that when Duval County and the City of Jacksonville consolidated in 1968, four communities, Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, Atlantic Beach and the City of Baldwin, elected to keep their own governments. That choice is why the Beaches have their own city halls, even though the city's own distance table puts Jacksonville just 18.3 miles away.

The line between the two governments is drawn service by service. According to the city, Duval County provides or funds beach renourishment, cleanup and some rescue services, and Jacksonville Beach residents vote for the mayor of Jacksonville, the Jacksonville City Council and the Duval County School Board as well as for their own mayor and council. Since November 2019 the City of Jacksonville has provided fire service under contract, ending a city fire department that the Jacksonville Beach website traces to 1890, when the town was still Pablo Beach.

Before the railroad, the only town on this stretch of coast was at the river mouth. The city history says river pilots and fishermen settled Mayport, then known as Hazard, as early as 1831; the Mayport Lighthouse went up in 1859; and by 1885 Mayport had 600 inhabitants, a post office and a school, with daily steamships bringing beach-goers down the St. Johns River from Jacksonville. The oceanfront to the south, where Jacksonville Beach now stands, had no town at all until promoters decided to build one.

Jacksonville Beach was a real estate venture from the start. The city history says Jacksonville businessmen chartered the Jacksonville and Atlantic Railway Company in 1883 to build sixteen and a half miles of narrow-gauge track from South Jacksonville to the Ruby Beach settlement, to create a summer resort. The state historical marker for the first settlers measures the line at 16.54 miles from the south bank of the St. Johns River to the beach.

Surveyor William E. Scull and his wife Eleanor were the first settlers. They lived in one tent and ran the general store and post office from another, and the marker records that Eleanor Scull was appointed postmaster on August 22, 1884, with mail carried by horse and buggy up the beach to Mayport and on to Jacksonville by steamer. The post office took the name Ruby, for the Sculls' first daughter. On November 12, 1884, about fifty prospective buyers arrived by excursion boat, and the railway sold thirty-four oceanfront lots that day for $7,514, according to the city.

On May 13, 1886, Ruby was renamed Pablo Beach, after the San Pablo River to the west that separates the island from the mainland, as the city's history explains. The railroad reached Pablo Beach in mid-1886, and the first resort hotel, the Murray Hall, opened with 192 rooms for 350 guests at a cost of $150,000. A boiler room fire around midnight on August 7, 1890, destroyed the hotel and the depot, and the later Adams House, Perkins House, Continental, Ocean View and Palmetto Lodge hotels were all lost to fire as well.

Henry M. Flagler took over the struggling railway as part of his Florida East Coast system, and in 1900 it was converted to standard gauge and extended to Mayport. The Coastal records that an amusement center known as Little Coney Island grew up at Pablo Beach, and that Atlantic Boulevard, finished in 1910, gave cars a direct route from Jacksonville. Pablo Beach was incorporated on May 22, 1907. On September 4, 1922, Lt. James H. Doolittle took off from the beach at Pablo Beach and flew to San Diego in less than 24 hours, breaking the transcontinental speed record, and in 1980 he returned to unveil a marker in Pablo Historical Park.

On June 15, 1925, the town's name changed to Jacksonville Beach, the historical marker records. The Coastal notes that the Casa Marina Hotel, designed by Marsh and Saxelbye, opened the same year. The boardwalk era had begun in 1915 and 1916 with dance pavilions, restaurants, boxing and wrestling, and the city's history says the boardwalk's popularity faded in the late 1950s after the state's limits on games of chance. Driving on the sand ended in 1979.

The town also shrank once. According to the Beaches Museum, Neptune was technically part of Pablo Beach and then Jacksonville Beach, until Neptune property owners, angry over a special tax levy and wary of consolidation, voted 113 to 31 on August 11, 1931, to separate. That vote created the boundary between Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach that still runs through the Beaches.

Roads kept tying the city to Jacksonville. The Jaxson reports that the Mayport Branch rail line was abandoned in 1932 and that the State of Florida used its right-of-way for Beach Boulevard, dedicated on December 17, 1949. The Coastal adds J. Turner Butler Boulevard in the late 1970s as a third direct route.

The Hill is the city's historic Black neighborhood, generally south of Beach Boulevard and west of State Road A1A. The Jaxson traces it to the segregation that followed Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which pushed a small Black community in Pablo Beach to the south side of the Jacksonville and Atlantic Railroad, first clustered around Shetter Avenue and 6th Street South. Many early residents built the area's railroads, roads and bridges or worked in the oceanfront resorts, and several worked for B.B. McCormick and Sons, the contractor responsible for much of the development of the Beaches communities.

The old street names survive in the record: Shockley, Griffin, Greiner, Susking and Mann avenues are now 1st through 5th Avenues South, and at the time South 10th Street was the city's western boundary. By 1960 a small commercial strip had formed along South 1st Avenue. The Jaxson notes in 2024 that the city has doubled in population since desegregation and describes the Hill, three blocks from the Atlantic, as a community facing displacement.

Jacksonville Beach uses a council-manager form of government. Policy rests with a seven-member City Council made up of a mayor, three members elected at large and three elected by district, all serving staggered four-year terms; the council appoints the city manager and city attorney and meets at City Hall, 11 North Third Street, on the first and third Mondays of most months. As of October 9, 2026, the city website lists Christine Hoffman as mayor, and the Government page names Mike Staffopoulos as city manager. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Jacksonville Beach website.

The city covers 8.06 square miles and counted 23,077 residents in 2010, according to the city demographics page, which places Neptune Beach 2.3 miles away, Atlantic Beach 3.6 miles and Ponte Vedra Beach 3.8 miles. It runs its own electric utility, Beaches Energy, and its own Ocean Rescue Division, an accredited Advanced agency of the United States Lifesaving Association with more than 50 lifeguards that patrols both the oceanfront and the Intracoastal Waterway year-round.