Imeson Airport in Jacksonville, Florida

Imeson Airport was Jacksonville's commercial airport on North Main Street from the late 1920s until Jacksonville International Airport opened in 1968.

The Jacksonville Aviation Authority history of aviation says a thoroughly modern Jacksonville Municipal Airport was built in 1926 adjacent to the City Prison Farm on North Main Street. It was originally named Jacksonville Municipal Airport Number One and was later renamed for Thomas Cole Imeson, and the authority says the facility served as the city's main airport for 42 years. State Archives of Florida records index the field as the Jacksonville-Thomas Cole Imeson Municipal Airport.

The land later turned to industry. A December 1978 photograph by the Florida Division of Tourism, held by the State Archives of Florida, shows the sign for the Imeson International Industrial Park on North Main Street in Jacksonville, filed under business parks and industrial districts in Duval County.

Jacksonville built its municipal airport in 1926 after early pilots made do with the beaches and a grass strip called Paxon Field.

The JAA history says that in the beginning pilots used the hard-packed sand of Jacksonville's beaches for runways, which were plenty long but too far from downtown Jacksonville to be convenient, and that there were no scheduled airline flights while the railroad was king. By 1923 local pilots were using a small grassy strip called Paxon Field on the city's western outskirts, the site of present-day Paxon High School on the Westside. The city realized at the same time that it needed a true airport able to support large air mail and passenger aircraft.

Two record flights framed that era. Robert Fowler, the first to fly the transcontinental route west to east, chose Jacksonville as his destination and landed at the Montcrief Park Race Track on February 8, 1912, after 115 days from Pasadena, California, in a 30 hp Wright Model B. On September 4, 1922, Lt. James H. Doolittle started a record transcontinental flight from Jacksonville Beach at 10:03 p.m., stopped once for fuel in San Antonio and landed in San Diego 21 hours and 18 minutes later.

Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis to Jacksonville on October 11, 1927, to help dedicate the new municipal airport on the Northside.

According to the JAA, Lindbergh came to help dedicate the airport and to help promote Jacksonville's fledgling aviation industry, and at a time when many still considered aviation a novelty he assured city leaders that air passenger service would span the nation.

A Jacksonville pilot set up the visit. The JAA credits Laurie Yonge, flying the Spirit of Jacksonville, with dropping an invitation from the air onto the deck of the ship returning Lindbergh and his plane. Yonge had offered airplane rides from the beaches in 1923 at $5 for short hops, $10 for long rides and $25 for aerobatics; his transport pilot license was the first issued in Florida, and in 1929 he set the world lightplane endurance record in a Curtiss Robin, flying 25 hours and 10 minutes, a record that stood until 1939.

Eastern Air Transport began regular Jacksonville service on January 1, 1931, and the field was later named for the city official who championed it.

The JAA says limited passenger service existed before 1931, but that regular Eastern service began that New Year's Day, when a small one-story wooden terminal of 600 square feet opened. The aircraft of the day was the seven-passenger Curtiss Kingbird, and a flight to New York still took two days. By the late 1950s, the authority says, Eastern, Delta, National and Southern all needed more room at the Jacksonville field as annual passenger figures soared into the hundreds of thousands.

The war brought federal work to the airport. The Federal Aviation Administration says its Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center opened in December 1941 at Imeson Airport in Jacksonville. The JAA adds that the Navy and the Army Air Corps built six airfields in the Jacksonville area for year-round pilot training, that Yonge trained more than 1,000 pilots under a government contract, and that after the war two of those fields, Craig and Herlong, were given to the City of Jacksonville for general aviation.

The JAA describes Thomas Cole Imeson (1880 to 1948) as a city councilman and later longtime commissioner in charge of airports and highways, whose work led to the creation of Jacksonville Municipal Airport and to improvements in its runways, hangars and terminal buildings. State Archives of Florida items show the field over those years: a 1941 Spottswood Studio photograph of hangars at Jacksonville Municipal Airport, a 1949 Duval News Company postcard of the Administration Building at Thomas Cole Imeson Airport, and a July 10, 1952 aerial photograph by Robert E. Fisher.

Jacksonville replaced Imeson because by the late 1950s the field was too small for jet airliners, which needed longer paved runways.

The JAA says the faster, heavier jets required longer, paved runways, and that more carriers wanted to serve Jacksonville. In 1965 taxpayers approved a $9 million bond issue to fund the new Jacksonville International Airport, planned at a time when supersonic travel was on the horizon.

Some functions had already left the Northside field. The FAA records that in February 1961 the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center moved from Imeson to Hilliard, and its own folklore section ties the move to Cold War worries, since Jacksonville, home of three Navy bases, was considered a likely target.

Airline service moved to Jacksonville International Airport when it opened in 1968, and the Imeson land became an industrial park on North Main Street.

The JAA's aviation history places the end of construction of the new Jacksonville International Airport in 1968, after Imeson had served as the city's main airport for 42 years. The official sources reviewed here do not give the exact day the last airline flight left Imeson.

The change came with consolidation. The JAA history says that just as construction of the new airport was ending in 1968, management of the city's airports was given to the Jacksonville Port Authority as part of the overall consolidation of Jacksonville's government. The Port Authority, created by the Florida Legislature in 1963, took over JAX, Craig and Herlong that year, and in 1998 the JAA history notes Jaxport marking thirty years of managing the city's airport system. In 1999 the former Cecil Field military base was transferred to the authority, and in May 2001 the Legislature split the Port Authority into separate airport and seaport authorities, effective October 1, 2001, operating as independent authorities of Duval County.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Jacksonville Aviation Authority's aviation history, the FAA's Jacksonville center overview, and four State Archives of Florida catalog records for the Imeson field and the industrial park that replaced it.