One of the major impacts that modern humans have had on the environment, in general, and the St. Johns River, in particular, has been the destruction of wetlands . We viewed them as useless land because they flooded and were hard to use to build on or grow crops. So, we dumped dirt on them to raise the level, and bulkheaded the margins along the shorelines. We often used the material from dredging the river to fill in the wetlands.
For instance, what we now know as Hecksher Drive was salt marsh 100 years ago. As we dredged the St. Johns River to allow larger ships to reach Jacksonville, we piled the spoil from that operation onto the adjacent wetlands. As that new land stabilized, oyster shells were placed on top to create a road that went to what was then Pilot Town and then eventually the Ribault Club on Fort George Island. In the late 1920s, a German-born, New York multimillionaire immigrant named August Hecksher built a toll road along the river that is named for him today.
However, it was death by a thousand cuts, with a little bit here, and a little bit there. No one thought that what they were doing was causing any real harm. What we didn’t realize, at the time, was the important function these “useless” wetlands had on the total ecology of the river ecosystem.