History
Ortega got its start in 1763, shortly after Spain ceded Florida to England. By 1780, Colonel Daniel McGirtt moved into the Jones Plantation and served with rebel troops in Georgia against the British. After some skirmishes, he later changed sides and joined the British, plundering the rebel troops and stealing Georgian cattle. Soon he formed a band of outlaws and terrorized the British, as well. The British governor, eventually had him court martialed and jailed at Castillo de San Marcos in Saint Augustine, but he eventually escaped. There is a road and park in the neighborhood still named after him to this day.
In 1902, J. Pierpont Morgan helped a local Florida senator finance what is modern day Ortega. By 1908, Ortega Company had completed a wooden bridge across the Ortega River, connecting to Avondale. A clubhouse was built and was designed by famed architect Henry Bacon of Lincoln Memorial. Bacon also built a house in the neighborhood, of which neither the original clubhouse or his house remain. The final construction boom occurred during the 1920s and Ortega has remained a neighborhood filled with wealthy businessmen and old families.
Read more about this topic: Ortega, Jacksonville, Florida
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)