Layer three, territory

Jacksonville

was Cowford

This is what an act of naming looks like when it is properly documented, and it is the entry every other entry in the catalogue is measured against.

What is recorded

Language: English, after a person
Year fixed: June 1822
Fixed by: The settlers who laid out twenty blocks and petitioned under the name
There now: The surveyed grid is still legible in the street pattern of the oldest part of the center

In June 1822 a settlement at the crossing was laid out as twenty blocks, and the settlers petitioned under the name Jacksonville. The name honors Andrew Jackson, who had been military governor of the newly acquired territory of Florida.

Three parts of that are documented and worth separating: the survey, the petition, and the honor.

The survey is the reason this entry has a date at all. A grid of twenty blocks is a physical, recorded act. It fixes the ground the name applies to.

The petition is the naming. A group of people put a name on a document and asked for it to be recognized. That is different in kind from Cowford, which was only ever what people said.

The honor is the part most often embellished. Jackson had held the governorship briefly, and he is not recorded as having visited the settlement that took his name. The name is a gesture toward a figure of consequence, made by people who wanted their new town recognized, which is one of the most ordinary reasons for a place name in the United States.

Why twenty blocks matters more than the man

Because it is the part that is still on the ground. The oldest part of the center still carries the grid, and a reader walking it is walking a survey from 1822 rather than a later plan laid over it.

A name applies to a defined area, and here the defined area is small and knowable. Every later name in this catalogue expands, contracts or sits beside that original twenty. When the county consolidated in 1968 the name went from covering a town to covering an area larger than some states, without the name changing at all. The same word now means something enormously bigger than what was surveyed in June 1822, and nothing in the record marks the moment it started to.

The part to be careful with

Dates in the 1820s in Florida come through territorial records, and the secondary literature is not always consistent about which day in June carries which act. This register prints the month and the year, and the acts in order, and does not print a specific day. Where a reader finds a confident single date, the question to ask is which document it comes from.

What this entry is not

It is not a biography of Andrew Jackson and it takes no position on him. He is recorded here as the person the name honors, in the office he held, in the year concerned. Readers who want the man rather than the name are looking for a different kind of publication.