Layer five, plat
Murray Hill
from English, a borrowed district name
The last entry in the catalogue is the one where the name has no local content at all. It was brought here because it sounded like the right kind of name, and that is a category of its own.
What is recorded
- Language
- English, a borrowed district name
- Year fixed
- 1906
- Fixed by
- Developers, borrowing a name from another city
- There now
- A residential district west of the center, with a commercial street along the old streetcar route
Murray Hill was founded in 1906. In 1916 it incorporated as a separate city with its own first mayor, Hugh Lauder. In 1925 it was annexed into Jacksonville.
The name is borrowed. It belongs, most famously, to a district in another American city, and there is nothing in this ground that produced it. It was imported.
Imported names as a category
This is the fifth and last kind of naming in the catalogue, and it is the one with the least to do with the place.
A developer selling lots wants a name that already sounds established. Borrowing one from a well regarded district somewhere else does that in one move: it carries an impression of settled respectability that a new subdivision on sandy ground cannot generate for itself.
That makes imported names almost information-free about the location, and highly informative about the moment. They tell you what the developer thought buyers admired. San Marco reached for Venice; Murray Hill reached for a northern city. Same instinct, different shelf.
The streetcar explains the shape
The commercial street here, Edgewood Avenue, runs where a streetcar line ran, and that is the reason a residential district has a compact strip of shopfronts rather than commerce scattered along a highway.
The subdivision immediately involved, Edgewood, was platted in 1884 by a group of northern investors led by James Randall Challen, two decades before Murray Hill itself. So the ground carries two plat names of different dates, and the commercial life settled on the older one's street.
A reader who wants one takeaway from the plat layer, take that: the transport came first, the plat followed it, and the shopfronts followed the transport. Where a district of this era has a walkable commercial strip, look for a former streetcar route under it.
Nine years as a city
Between 1916 and 1925 this was a municipality with its own mayor. It is a short life and an ordinary one for the period: small towns around a growing city incorporated to get services or to control their own development, and were annexed when that stopped being viable or stopped being attractive.
The name survived the annexation, which is the normal outcome. What is abnormal is surviving as a government, and only four places in this county managed that, in 1968, which is its own page.
Sourcing, honestly
The 1906 founding, the 1916 incorporation with its first mayor, and the 1925 annexation come from local historical writing. There is no federal historic district here to provide a nomination. The 1884 Edgewood plat is the firmest date on the page because a plat is a document.
The borrowed origin of the name is the weakest claim: it is what every source says, and none of them cites the person who chose it. Treat it as the standing account rather than as an established act, which is the same caution this register applies at Mandarin.