Historic Eggleston Community

Historic Eggleston Community. . In 1888 Oliver H. P. Champlin, a native of New York, platted the community of Eggleston and solicited religious settlers from New Jersey to come to Florida. He named his community Eggleston after his wife's family. Street names that still exist today were family names: Almira after his wife, and Ransom, his son. Eggleston stretched from Lake Lucina to Ansley Street and was a quarter of a mile wide., The little community had its own post office, several stores, a school located across the road from Michigan Avenue, which it shared with the nearby community of Floral Bluff, and even a hotel. A church financed by the widow of, and named after, Methodist minister John E. Inskip, opened its doors in 1889. Champlin organized a Chatauqua, an educational assembly, each year which attracted many visitors who stayed in the hotel or a nearby campground. The Jacksonville, Mayport and Pablo Railroad, its Eggleston station complete with a waiting room, provided twice-daily service to the beaches and to a dock with ferry service to Jacksonville., In 1895 the railroad ceased operations and the one-denominational community began to dwindle. The post office merged with the Floral Bluff office. The church moved south on Chaseville Road, now University Boulevard, and became the Arlington Methodist Church. The hotel closed and the building moved to riverfront property adjacent to where the Mathews Bridge is today where it sat for many years before being demolished in the mid-sixties. In 1921 when Arlington Grammar School opened children in grades 1 through 6 now went there., While a separate community no longer exists, the Eggleston subdivision that Champlin platted in 1888 remains. Those who grew up there in the earlier decades of the 1900s always considered themselves from Eggleston even when Eggleston as a separate community was no longer visible.