Jacksonsville: An Office Profile;

              Just a short drive from the southern
border of Georgia, dominating the north-east
comer of Florida, lies Jacksonville,
the largest city in area in the forty-eight
contiguous states. Indeed, Jacksonville's
840.1 square miles give it more area than
New York City and Los Angeles com-bined.
But even in a nation that has an
almost mystical reverence for numbers
and is given to boasting of being the big-gest
and the best, statistics tell only part
of the story.
Numbers can help put things in per-spective
sometimes, especially for those
whose concept of Florida has been shaped
by the image of orange trees and tropical
sunsets seen from under swaying palms
on the sands of Miami Beach. The most
populous city in Florida, with about
585,000 people, Jacksonville ranks third
in the southeast and twenty-third in the
country. It enjoys four distinct seasons,
with few of the temperature extremes of
cities lying farther south or to the north.
The mean temperature in December, for
example, is about fifty-five degrees, while
in summer it is eighty degrees. Rainfall
averages about fifty-five inches annually,
and the city enjoys an average of 277 days
of sunshine out of every 365.
Jacksonville's history and economy
have been shaped by its location near the
mouth of the St. Johns River, providing
easy access to the Atlantic Ocean and the
Intracoastal Waterway, its excellent deep-water
port facilities, and its location cen-tral
to key markers in the south and south-east.
The city lies 350 miles from Miami,
the same distance from Atlanta, 390 miles
from Charlotte, North Carolina and 450
miles from Birmingham, Alabama.
The roots of Jacksonville stretch back
to the first stirrings of European explora-tion
and conquest of the New World, In
April of 1562. only seventy years after the
first voyage of Columbus and fifty-eight
years before the Pilgrims came ashore at
Plymouth, a band of French explorers
led by jean Ribault anchored at the mouth
of the St. Johns. A year later a colony was
established at Fort Caroline, where the
river meets the Atlantic, by a band of
French Huguenots, marking the first
Protestant colony on the continent.
Four Seasons in the Sun