On Jacksonville’s Southside, driving almost anywhere will eventually involve a trip on J. Turner Butler Blvd., also known as State Road 202, or more informally as just “JTB.” The road is named for Jacksonville attorney James Turner Butler (1882-1969). Butler represented Duval County in the Florida legislature, and later as a state senator, where he served as Senate president from 1939 to 1941. He was keenly interested in highway planning and construction, and an ardent advocate for the creation of the Jacksonville Expressway Authority, which helps explain his memorialization on countless highway signs across the southside of Jacksonville.
If your travels on JTB take you to or from the beaches, you’ll pass more big overhead green signs with white letters announcing the exits onto Kernan Blvd. and Hodges Blvd. The two roads lie in between the University of North Florida and the Mayo Clinic. Both are major, divided multi-lane boulevards that run north and south. Hodges runs from Butler Blvd. to Atlantic Blvd., while Kernan connects Butler Blvd. at its south end with McCormick Road at the north, with an overpass and interchange at Beach Blvd.
Kernan Boulevard is named for the late Kernan Regen Hodges (1938-2022), a native of Franklin, Tennessee. In 1962, as a young woman and expert equestrienne, Kernan Regen moved to Jacksonville to accept a job offered by Bryant Skinner, Sr., at the then new Deerwood Country Club. There the Skinner family introduced a variety of recreational programs for members, including horseback riding. Kernan Regen is well-remembered by early Deerwood residents for her skill and energy in establishing and growing the community’s equestrian program, which at the time was ideally situated among pine forests laced with miles of sandy trails.
While working at Deerwood, young Kernan Regen met the son of a neighboring landowner, George H. Hodges, Jr. (1938-2019), who was similarly outdoors-minded. In 1965 the two married and settled on a 5,000-acre tract owned by the Hodges family that lay just to the east of the Skinner family’s land encompassing Deerwood. There Kernan Hodges and her new husband established Deep Forest Stables, a new equestrian center that served as the home base for a life that included raising and training thoroughbred horses and supported equine events nationally. In the meantime, her husband George continued his father’s enterprises that included development of the Hodges family’s extensive land holdings in the area.
It was from those tracts that the family donated land for the extension of J. Turner Butler Blvd., and for the roads that bear the Hodges name as well as that of George’s wife, Kernan. Both names appear throughout the area in such places as the Glen Kernan Country Club and Hodges Boulevard Presbyterian Church. As philanthropists, the Hodges donated part of the land for what became the University of North Florida, and supported the Bolles School, Jacksonville University, the Mayo Clinic, and numerous other Jacksonville community institutions and causes.
Motorists on Butler Blvd. in the vicinity of Kernan and Hodges Blvds. may notice that the land lying south of Butler Blvd. appears undeveloped. In fact, it is the 3,000-acre tract that was formerly the site of Deep Forest Stables. The entire parcel remains in its nearly natural undeveloped state, and that is how it will stay in perpetuity because of the Hodges family, who provided for it to be kept as conservation land under the control of the State of Florida. The tract includes pine and oak woods, and wetlands draining into Pablo Creek and the Intracoastal Waterway.
A lot of lives and stories are represented by the names on street signs that we pass each day. George and Kernan Hodges and James Turner Butler are three whose lasting prominence in this city is ensured by the importance of the public roadways that are named for them. All three roads came about within the past 60 years, and all three people made a difference in the lives of Jacksonville’s people, today and for the decades to come.
Alan J. Bliss, Ph.D. | CEO, Jacksonville History Center