United States · Florida · Jacksonville
Mandarin, Jacksonville — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Live oaks shade Mandarin Road above the St. Johns River in Mandarin, a Jacksonville district named in 1830 for the mandarin orange.
About Mandarin
Where to stay in Mandarin
The right area depends on your trip — here's what each neighbourhood is best for.
Mandarin has next to no lodging along the St. Johns River, and the nearest rooms sit at the Interstate 295 interchanges on its northern edge. Mandarin Road is the other spine. It runs the water's edge under moss-hung live oaks, past houses, churches, and the old store and post office at 12471 Mandarin Road.
San Jose Boulevard, the inland run of Florida State Road 13, takes the shops and the traffic. You will want a car: Downtown Jacksonville and its hotel blocks stand some ten miles north, and the district itself runs some five miles from Beauclerc to Julington Creek.
About Mandarin
What are the main landmarks in Mandarin?
Mandarin's landmarks line Mandarin Road, the lane that follows the St. Johns River. The Mandarin Store and Post Office, built in 1911 at 12471 Mandarin Road, traded until 1964 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2001. Walter Jones Historical Park opened in 2000 on ten riverfront acres.
It gathers the Mandarin Museum, the Losco family's winery cabin, a sawmill, and the St. Joseph's Mission Schoolhouse for African American Children. The Church of Our Saviour keeps the bank at 12236 Mandarin Road, its congregation founded in 1880. Hurricane Dora took the 1883 church.
The congregation rebuilt it.
What is the history of Mandarin?
Mandarin took its name in 1830 from the mandarin orange, the crop its growers shipped down the St. Johns River to Jacksonville by steamboat. On April 1, 1864, the Union transport Maple Leaf struck a Confederate mine off Mandarin Point and sank, killing four Black crewmen. Freed families made up most of the village after the war.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wintered here for seventeen seasons from 1867, wrote Palmetto Leaves, and pressed the Freedmen's Bureau for a school for Black children. Her cottage is gone. Freezes killed the groves in the 1890s, and consolidation folded Mandarin into Jacksonville in 1968.
Where is Mandarin?
Mandarin sits on the east bank of the St. Johns River in southern Jacksonville, between Beauclerc and Julington Creek, with Orange Park across the water.
More areas in Jacksonville
Updated September 2026