Fleming Island History: From Plantation to Airfield to Suburb

The Land Grant

George Fleming, an Irish immigrant, received a 1,000-acre land grant from the Spanish governor of East Florida in 1790. The grant was payment for his military service, and Fleming established a plantation on the parcel. He named it Hibernia, the Latin name for Ireland. The settlement that grew from that plantation still carries the name today, a quiet marker on the St. Johns River shoreline about 21 miles southwest of downtown Jacksonville.

The island itself took the family name. Fleming’s plantation operated through the Spanish and later American territorial periods, and the Hibernia settlement became a river landing for steamboats and timber traffic. The plantation era ended long ago, but the name persisted through every subsequent chapter of the island’s history.

The War Years

In 1942, the U.S. Navy built NOLF Fleming Island, a Naval Outlying Landing Field. Four asphalt runways were laid across the island’s flat, cleared land. The field served as a satellite training strip for pilots from nearby Jacksonville Naval Air Station, part of the massive wartime expansion of naval aviation along the Florida coast.

The runways were built for propeller-driven aircraft. They were adequate for the training planes of the early 1940s, but the field’s days were numbered from the start. The Navy abandoned the airfield in the 1960s. The reason was simple: the runways were too short for jets. What had been a strategic asset during the war became surplus, and the asphalt was left to crack and weather.

The Decay

For roughly three decades, the abandoned airfield sat in place. The runways outlived their purpose, and the land reverted to a kind of limbo. The asphalt broke apart, weeds pushed through the cracks, and the field became a local landmark of a different sort — a place where the past was visible but unusable.

The Navy formally declared the property surplus, and the land passed into civilian hands. For years, the runways remained as a physical reminder of the island’s military chapter, even as the surrounding area began to develop. The field was too large and too poorly located for industrial reuse, and too degraded for any kind of preservation. It sat, waiting.

The Subdivision

In the late 1990s, the decaying airfield was demolished. The asphalt was torn up, the land was graded, and the streets that now stand there were built. The neighbourhoods that cover the old runways today are typical of suburban Clay County: single-family homes, manicured lawns, and quiet streets that give no indication of what came before.

The demolition was complete enough that little visible trace of the airfield remains. The geometry of the old runways is not even reflected in the street layout, which follows conventional suburban patterns rather than the angled intersections of the former taxiways. The military past is now invisible to anyone who does not know to look for it.

The Present

The census figures describe a community that has fully absorbed its layered history. The population stands at 29,351 people, with a median age of 47.7 years. The median household income is $119,046, and the median home value is $387,400. The unemployment rate is 1.8 percent, and 47.9 percent of residents hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

There are 11,842 total housing units on the island, of which 545 are vacant. Only 132 units are held for seasonal or recreational use — a figure that suggests this is a place where people live year-round, not a vacation destination. The median gross rent is $1,918.

The Layering

The island’s history is a sequence of erasures. The 1790 plantation gave way to the 1942 airfield, which gave way to the late-1990s subdivision. Each layer was built on top of the previous one, and each layer was treated as disposable when its time passed.

The Hibernia settlement still exists, a small community on the island’s river side that retains its name. But the plantation that founded it is gone, the airfield that replaced the plantation’s fields is gone, and the runways that defined the island for half a century are now buried under driveways and lawns.

The Comparison

Fleming Island’s trajectory differs from the nearby towns covered in this guide. Palm Coast, 51 miles away, hosts the Creekside Music & Arts Festival. Flagler Beach, 59 miles away, holds First Friday events. Mount Dora, 89 miles away, runs the Mount Dora Arts Festival and the Mount Dora Craft Fair. Sanford, 95 miles away, has Sanford Porchfest. Altamonte Springs, 102 miles away, puts on Red Hot & Boom.

None of those places had a naval airfield demolished to make way for their current form. Fleming Island is not a festival town or a historic district. It is a suburb built on the remains of a military installation, which was itself built on the remains of a plantation. The island does not market its history because there is almost nothing left of it to market.

The river still runs along the island’s western edge, the same water that carried steamboats to the Hibernia landing in the 1800s. The name still appears on maps. But the physical evidence of the island’s first two lives is gone, replaced by the quiet, layered suburb that now occupies the ground.