Jacksonville in 1901 was a city of wooden buildings and wood-shingled roofs, and the drought had turned every surface into tinder. The fire moved east from the Cleaveland Fibre Factory with terrifying efficiency. Contemporary accounts said the flames spread from house to house "with the rapidity that a man could walk." The glow was reportedly visible from Savannah, Georgia, and smoke plumes reached as far as Raleigh, North Carolina. James Weldon Johnson, then the principal of a local school, later described a grim racial dimension: he witnessed firefighters concentrating their efforts on saving a row of frame houses belonging to a white man named Steve Melton while allowing the fire to burn unchecked through the predominantly Black neighborhoods of the city's western end. Seven people died. The Duval County Courthouse and all of its real estate records were destroyed, a loss so complete that to this day, deeds in Duval County distinguish between "the current public records" and "the former public records" -- a legal peculiarity unique among Florida's 67 counties.

Florida Governor William S. Jennings declared martial law and dispatched state militia units to restore order. Reconstruction began almost immediately, and civil authority was returned by May 17, just two weeks after the fire. The destruction was staggering. Block after block of downtown lay in ruins. St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, built of brick in 1887, stood as the only major church to survive the flames, a solitary monument amid charred rubble. The pre-fire city was effectively erased. The only surviving real estate records from before May 3, 1901, are title abstracts held by Title and Trust, a title company that still charges for access to its archive. Everything else went up with the wooden city.

From the ashes came an architect. Henry John Klutho arrived from New York and threw himself into rebuilding Jacksonville, drawing inspiration from the Prairie Style then being pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago and the Midwest. Klutho and his contemporaries gave Jacksonville something it had never had: bold, modern architecture with a distinctly Florida flair. Klutho's projects came fast: the Dyal-Upchurch Building in 1902, the Carnegie Library in 1905, the Bisbee Building in 1909, the Morocco Temple in 1910, and the Florida Baptist Building in 1924. Many of his buildings were demolished or abandoned by the 1980s, but several endure, including his most prominent work, the St. James Building, which now serves as Jacksonville City Hall. The post-fire reconstruction gave Jacksonville one of the largest collections of Prairie Style buildings outside the Midwest, a direct and lasting architectural consequence of a pile of burning moss.

The Great Fire of 1901 did not just reshape Jacksonville's skyline. It exposed the racial fault lines that ran through the city's foundations. Johnson's account of firefighters prioritizing white property over Black neighborhoods became part of the historical record, a documented instance of how disaster and discrimination could compound each other. The fire also catalyzed Jacksonville's transformation from a modest port town into a modern city. Forced to start over, civic leaders embraced building codes, fireproof construction, and professional urban planning. The brick and concrete that replaced pine and shingle made the new Jacksonville more resilient, and the architects who did the work left behind a built environment of genuine distinction. Today, walking the blocks of downtown Jacksonville, you are walking on the ghost of a wooden city that vanished in an afternoon.