Oneida Bungalow Court

West Lewisville History

The historic Oneida Bungalow Court is the last remaining group of homes once part of the West Lewisville neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida. The history of the area dates back to 1801 when a Spanish land grant of 800 acres was ceded to Phillip Dell, leading to the creation of the Dell’s Bluff Plantation. For nearly fifty years, enslaved people cultivated sea island cotton on this land, which thrived until the late 1850s and later served as a Union Army encampment for colored troops during the Civil War. In the post-war era, the land was transformed; in 1875, Confederate veteran Miles Price platted West Lewisville as a 10-block by 10-block expansion of the nearby Brooklyn neigborhood which Price also platted.

West Lewisville’s streets were narrow in width, with a streetcar line connecting the neighborhood to downtown. Highway Avenue (now Edison Street) served as West Lewisville’s primary commercial corridor.

In the wake of the Great Fire of 1901, West Lewisville emerged as a sought-after residential hub for African Americans, drawn to the area by the abundant jobs provided by adjacent manufacturing plants and railyards. Over the next two decades, the bustling working-class community of Jacksonville’s westside underwent a dramatic transformation from a primarily residential area into a dense industrial hub.

This shift began with the city’s efforts to manage solid waste by opening the Forest Street Incinerator in West Lewisville, followed by the massive 1919 expansion of the Jacksonville Terminal and the 1930 McCoys Creek Improvement Project. By the 1930s, the neighborhood’s original landscape of modest housing had evolved into a significant employment center where major industrial operations, including Orange Crush Bottling Works, Dekle Lumber, Domestic Laundry, Consumers Ice, and slaughterhouses like Draper’s Egg and Poultry and Jones-Chambliss Meat Packers, operated directly alongside the working-class homes lining the area’s narrow 19th-century streets. Those homes were predominantly modest, one-story shotgun houses such as those found in LaVilla.

Francis P. L’Engle and the Oneida Bungalow Court

At the heart of this thriving community was the Oneida Bungalow Court, developed in 1925 by Francis Porcher L’Engle Sr., grandson of the first mayor and founder of LaVilla, Francis Fatio L’Engle. Born in Orange Mills, Florida, in 1888, Francis P. L’Engle, Sr. moved to Jacksonville at a young age. After earning his law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1909, he began his legal practice in Jacksonville. Beyond his professional life, L’Engle also served in the U.S. Army in the Motor Transport Corps during World War I.

This unique complex featured 29 homes, a service station, and a private lane called Wade Drive, which remains unpaved to this day, as it has since its establishment. According to Charles Coley, who resided at Oneida Court for over fifty years, he recalled that Wade Drive was known as “rock road” as it was paved with “railroad rock”.

According to the L’Engle family, the Oneida Bungalow Court was sold during the 1930s or 1940s to the N.G. Wade Company, led by president Neill Gillespie Wade, Jr. Originally a native of Wade, North Carolina, Wade moved to Florida in 1899 and built his early career in railroad construction for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad before eventually establishing his own investment firm. The property remained under the ownership of the N.G. Wade Company for several decades until it was sold to the property management company I. Beverly Nalle, Inc. in 1994.

Environmental Damage and Decline

Despite its initial success as a tight-knit community, West Lewisville faced a devastating decline in the mid-20th century as the rapid development of the neighborhood also led to severe pollution. For years, residents complained about the environmental impact of the Draper’s Egg & Poultry Company on McCoy’s Creek Boulevard, where animal blood frequently ran off directly into McCoy’s Creek. A few blocks east stood the Jones-Chambliss meat packing plant on Forest Street, whose waste also flowed into McCoy’s Creek.

In addition to industrial pollution, the community faced a severe public health crisis stemming from the Forest Street incinerator. Located just north of the Oneida Bungalow Court, the facility blanketed the neighborhood in toxic ash for over sixty years, from 1899 until the 1960s. The ash contained arsenic, lead, and other cancer-causing dioxins. The environmental impact was further compounded by the city’s practice of spreading this hazardous ash onto unpaved streets to stabilize them, leading to widespread soil contamination.

Several years later, an investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found ash deposits in the ground soil typically less than 2 feet thick, but was as thick as 10 feet deep in some areas. The deepest ash deposits were located adjacent to McCoy’s Creek. While the Forest Street Incinerator Site covered approximately 10.5 acres, the total area impacted by the ash was approximately 27 to 29 acres. This long-term exposure created a massive health hazard for residents, eventually necessitating extensive modern remediation efforts to address this disaster.

The West Lewisville and Forest Park School

Between the Jones-Chambliss slaughterhouse and the incinerator, the City of Jacksonville established Forest Park School in 1954 to replace the old West Lewisville Public School. The old school, located on the corner of Lewis and Goodwin Streets, was built in 1895 and did not have electric lights until sometime in the 1940s. For students who did not have lunch, food was given by residents of the Oneida Bungalow Court from their homes. When the school was demolished in 1962, much of the wood was salvaged by residents who used it as fuel for their heaters and fireplaces.

The new Forest Park School was one of many segregated schools in Jacksonville built under the “separate but equal” doctrine. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that all laws establishing segregated schools were unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.

By January 1967, the court found that the School Board was either incapable or unwilling to” desegregate the Jacksonville public school system, so the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the South Florida Desegregation Center, located at the University of Miami, were tasked to formulate a plan to desegregate Duval County schools. Under the new plan, seven segregated schools were to be closed in 1972.

Despite it being relatively new and quite large, Forest Park was shut down due to environmental concerns, citing that the school was “surrounded by a City incinerator on the East, a polluted creek on the North, and a meat and poultry (abattoir) company on the West. This has caused a serious problem with regard to stench and sewage backing up in the school plant.”

Although Forest Park Elementary School was shuttered, it would reopen as Forest Park Head Start School, which provided child development care for preschool children from low-income families. Cleanup of the contaminated soil wouldn’t begin until 2006 as part of a much larger cleanup effort encompassing over 520 acres involving a second former incinerator site and several dump sites located on both sides of the Ribault River.

Legacy

Like many Black communities in this country, West Lewisville saw its neighborhood physically severed when construction of the interstate highway system commenced in the mid to late 1950s, consuming a third of its footprint and razing hundreds of homes under eminent domain.

Today, the Oneida Bungalow Court stands as the last remaining concentration of residential housing in a neighborhood that has been largely erased. As one of the few surviving African American bungalow courts in the state, it represents over two centuries of history, ranging from the era of slavery to the Civil Rights movement. Its survival is particularly poignant when contrasted with the preserved historic architecture of the adjacent, wealthier Riverside and Avondale districts. Advocates argue that Oneida Court is a vital cultural landmark that must be saved to honor the legacy of one of Jacksonville’s earliest African American and Gullah Geechee neighborhoods before its physical history vanishes entirely.

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