National Park Service Invites Public Input on Fort Caroline Memorial Relocation

Date:
March 2, 2026

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - The National Park Service invites the public to comment on the environmental assessment for the relocation of the Fort Caroline Memorial. This project proposes to create a new outdoor memorial to commemorate French settlers who built Fort Caroline in the 1560s and mitigate flooding concerns at the current memorial location.

The purpose of this project is to mitigate damages to the memorial from Hurricane Ian and address frequent flooding concerns from increasing tidal influences. The project will act on the recommendations provided in the April 2021 Facility Management Hazard Resiliency Workshop Report to redesign and construct a new memorial on higher ground within the park. The preliminary preferred action alternative would completely remove the Memorial Fort Exhibit to an area outside of the floodplain that would not be impacted by flood or storm surge.

Under the preferred alternative, actions would include:

• Relocation, redesign and construction of a new memorial on higher ground.
• Salvaging significant exhibit items from the old memorial site, such as the vaulted entry gate and incorporating them into the new memorial site.
• Providing new accessible opportunities for the public and the new fort exhibit location.

The proposed action incorporates input received during early public engagement in summer 2025. The NPS will accept public comments through April 1 using one of the methods below:

Online (preferred)

Submit comments through the project website .

Mail (postmarked by April 1)

Superintendent Attn: Relocate Fort Caroline Memorial Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve 1 3165 Mount Pleasant Rd., Jacksonville FL, 32225

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The NPS receives disaster supplement funding from Congress to help with the costs of natural disasters. In 2023, the omnibus funding bill included $1.5 billion in supplemental disaster funding for the NPS to help parks affected by recent natural disasters. The funding is intended to cover the costs of repairing and rebuilding ecosystems, infrastructure and historically significant structures. It also aims to provide resiliency funds to better protect national park sites and communities, and to ensure that national parks are built to withstand future storms.

Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, a unit of the NPS, is a 46,000+ acre park located in Jacksonville, Florida that held multiple plantations during the Spanish, English and American periods. These plantation sites which include Kingsley Plantation, Houston Plantation on Big Talbot Island and Fitzpatrick Plantation at Cedar Point were sites of bondage and of escape. In addition, the park's natural resources include thousands of acres of waterways including portions of the St. Johns and Nassau rivers. These water corridors were the route people traveled in their effort to find freedom. Due to the broad geographic area of the park and the complex history, the park can tell several different stories about freedom seekers. The carpenters and coopers of St. Johns Town in the British period, the Guerrero survivors in 1829, Charles and Dorcas in 1835, Romeo Murray in 1843, James and Pattie during the Civil War and others who sought liberty from various locations within Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. To learn more about the history, please visit www.nps.gov/timu/learn/historyculture.

Visit Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve online at www.nps.gov/timu or follow the park on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ TimucuanPreserveNPS and Instagram at www.instagram.com/timucuannps.