Lincoln Villas was established as a place for Jacksonville's African American residents.
Published on August 26, 2026 at 10:09 am
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At the intersection of New Kings Road and Moncrief Road in Northwest Jacksonville lies Lincoln Villas, a neighborhood whose quiet streets trace back to a time when this part of Duval County was still rural countryside.
The establishment of Lincoln Villas
More than a century ago, Lincoln Villas was promoted as a place where African American residents could purchase land, build homes and establish a measure of independence beyond the boundaries of the segregated city. Its development reflects a larger story of landownership, self-sufficiency and suburban growth in what has ultimately become known as Northwest Jacksonville since the Jim Crow era.
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As early as 1913, Lincoln Villas was being marketed by J.D. Harnett & Co, which was founded in August 1912 by James Dudley Harnett. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1876, Harnett moved to Mayport during the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1901 and was involved in the lumber industry before going into real estate.
Harnett’s business, which was active until December 1936, focused on development of subdivisions for the Black community during segregation. From offices located on Broad Street in LaVilla, the company advertised the Lincoln Villas development as an “exclusive suburb,” with Moncrief Avenue passing through the property and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad expected to establish a nearby station. Homesites initially sold for just $25, with terms of one dollar down and fifty cents a week. By July 1913, approximately 200 lots had already been sold.
By February 1914, the Harnett company reported selling more than 700 tracts during the previous six months. Quarter- and half-acre properties were offered along Moncrief Road, providing far more land than families could typically obtain in Jacksonville’s densely developed urban neighborhoods. At the same time, the company began marketing Moncrief Park development, which is now recognized as the neighborhood of Moncrief.
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While Moncrief Park was marketed for the Black middle class within city limits, Lincoln Villas was specifically marketed to African Americans seeking to own property outside of the city limits. Its large lots also supported a distinctly rural lifestyle. Residents could maintain gardens, raise chickens and grow fruits and vegetables, combining homeownership with household food production and self-sufficiency.
Advertisements continued promoting this lifestyle into the 1930s. Lots were offered on affordable monthly terms, with prospective buyers encouraged to build the kind of home they wanted while raising vegetables, fruit and chickens.
The community developed during a period when Jacksonville’s Black population was building institutions and neighborhoods both within and beyond the city’s urban core. Nearby Black communities, churches, schools and recreational destinations gradually created a wider cultural landscape across Northwest Jacksonville. Lincoln Villas was named for Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation became one of the defining symbols of freedom in the region during the Civil War.
A changing landscape
Transportation would eventually transform the community. For generations, Old Kings Road traced a historic route through Northwest Jacksonville. During the early 20th century, it became associated with the Dixie Highway system and later U.S. Route 1. In 1935, a new, more direct highway between Grand Park and the Nassau County line opened as the Waycross-Jacksonville Highway. Today, known as New Kings Road, the new alignment cuts directly through the Lincoln Villas community.
What began as a rural neighborhood along Moncrief Road suddenly found itself divided by an increasingly important regional highway. By around 1950, the corridor also became the southern terminus of U.S. Route 23, connecting Jacksonville northward toward Michigan. New Kings Road was widened from two lanes to four during the 1950s as suburban development accelerated across the county.
That growth brought new neighborhoods and institutions into the surrounding area. Nearby, Lincoln Golf and Country Club had opened in 1926 under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, president of Florida’s first life insurance company and Florida’s first Black millionaire. Created during segregation, the nine-hole course became a major social and recreational center for African Americans, attracting tournaments, prominent golfers and visitors from across the South. After Lewis died in 1947, the club briefly closed before reopening as Jacksonville’s first integrated golf club. Its property was ultimately redeveloped during the early 1960s as Lincoln Estates and Carver Manor.
The broader area also became associated with one of Jacksonville’s most painful Civil Rights-era events. On March 23, 1964, 35-year-old Johnnie Mae Chappell, a mother of ten, was searching for a lost wallet along New Kings Road near her home when she was shot and killed by a white gunman. Her murder, occurring amid racial unrest in Jacksonville, became a lasting symbol of the injustice and unequal treatment Black residents faced during the Jim Crow era.
Chappell’s name was later added to the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 2005 the Florida Legislature designated a portion of the highway as the Johnnie Mae Chappell Parkway.
Lincoln Villas itself remained outside Jacksonville’s municipal boundaries until city-county consolidation in 1968, when the formerly unincorporated community became part of the consolidated City of Jacksonville. By then, the landscape around it was rapidly changing. Highways, subdivisions, schools, churches and motels increasingly replaced the agricultural land that had once defined Northwest Jacksonville.
Yet Lincoln Villas retained elements of its earlier character. Unlike many urban neighborhoods where small lots and closely spaced houses dominate the landscape, portions of Lincoln Villas still reflect the spacious development pattern established more than a century ago.
Today, Lincoln Villas is easy to overlook while traveling the busy stretch of New Kings Road between Soutel Drive and Interstate 295. However, behind the traffic lies a neighborhood rooted in a much different landscape.
More than simply an old subdivision, Lincoln Villas represents an important chapter in Jacksonville’s history, a surviving reminder that during an era defined by exclusion, landownership itself could become a powerful expression of independence, stability and community building.
