A new museum exhibit captures wartime at the Beaches. | Beaches Museum collection
Published on July 10, 2025 at 3:34 pm
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A new exhibit at the Beaches Museum captures how wars have changed the physical and cultural landscape of the First Coast.
From reshaped waterways and the construction of military installations with runways and hangars, to the sacrifices by residents, the exhibit shows how the Beaches community has been affected by conflicts across the centuries.
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The exhibit covers wars in the area from 1500 to 2007. The Beaches area, at times, functioned as an armed camp, including Mayport Naval Station, Camp Atlantic Beach and the U.S. Coast Guard patrols of the beach during World War II. Casa Marina Hotel at one point was used for military housing.
Archives and collections manager Susan Gold curated the exhibit called Beach Front Home Front. It highlights the off-shore battles along Jacksonville Beach, including the German U-boat attack on the USS Gulf America near the Jacksonville Beach pier, which brought World War II home to a beachside amusement park.
“Children were out playing still on the boardwalk that night, and that’s at least three of the firsthand accounts we have in the collection, from children between the ages of 10 and 16. So that’s the memories that we have that are still in the collection,” Gold said.
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It was such a prominent event, that there is a historic marker about it out on the boardwalk, near the pier today.
Gold said Hitler U-boats came over from Europe to the Florida coast to “make a big noise” along the U.S. commercial shipping channel. There was no blackout order being enforced so bright lights on the beach allowed the U-boats to see and torpedo American vessels.
“I think that that event was a real wake-up call for the beaches residents,” said the museum’s executive director, Chris Hoffman, “because they weren’t really enforcing the blackouts and the war was something further away from them. We have a lot of first-hand accounts of people that actually witnessed it — and certainly we’re losing some of those first-hand accounts as the years go by — but we’ve been happy to capture some of those in our archives and collections.”
The exhibit has a map of skeletons of sunken vessels along the coastlines that are relics of WW II. In 1942, one of every 12 ships went down in Florida waters, leaving hundreds dead and sending millions of dollars in cargo and oil to the bottom. Also new to the collection are some artifacts from the sunken USS Gulf America that were brought up by divers.
The civilian involvement during that time includes the story of Elizabeth Starke, who came to the area in 1913, but when war broke out she decided that she would patrol the beaches to make sure that no German spies would come ashore and infiltrate the area.
Starke organized and trained 12- to 15-year-old Girl Scouts in horsemanship and marksmanship to patrol the beaches after school and on the weekends and the women of Mayport patrolled other times.
The government eventually took her land by eminent domain (and her estate called Wonderwood) and built a base on it. History shows Starke was left destitute and could not fight the land grab by the government.
The exhibit opens Friday, July 11th at 6 p.m. and runs through November 16th. Florida Humanities writer and speaker Eliot Kleinberg will give a talk called “War in Paradise” at 6:30 August 7, 2025 at the museum. Kleinberg, who worked for 50 years at the Palm Beach Post and is noted for his books “Weird Florida” and “Black Cloud,” a history of the great 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. The Beaches Museum is at 381 Beach Boulevard, Jacksonville Beach.
