Today in Jacksonville History: June 10, 1926

The Day of the Elephant.

Miss Chic arrived.

Jacksonville became one of the first cities in America to have a municipal elephant when the steamer Ozark pulled into the Clyde Line dock downtown from Boston and lowered a crated pachyderm over the side at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

Scores were on hand to meet her, including City Commissioner St. Elmo "Chic" Acosta, the elephant's namesake.

(Acosta is believed to be the only city official in the nation to have both an elephant and a bridge named after him.)

Miss Chic was an Indian elephant in her formative years who weighed in at about 750 pounds and was described by her handlers as quite playful.

She had been purchased for the Jacksonville zoo by public subscription of $3,000 from Hagenbach Brothers Co. in Hamburg, Germany.

Her arrival literally signaled the beginning of the municipal zoo, which had been moved from Springfield Park to its home on Trout River only the year before.

For generations of Jacksonville children, Miss Chic would be the must-see attraction at the Jacksonville zoo, the destination of obligatory field trips from each of the public schools.

In elephantine majesty, Miss Chic came to dwell in her own special house, an Art Deco manse designed by Roy Benjamin in 1935 and which remained one of Jacksonville's more unusual architectural landmarks until making way for progress, years after Miss Chic's demise.

On this day on the dock, Miss Chic was petted through the slats of her crate by an abundance of official and youthful hands, hauled on a truck and escorted by boys on bicycles to the zoo, where she was given lunch of peanuts and hay and installed as elephant-of-the-walk.

"Consternation reigned in the monkey colony," The Florida Times-Union reported. "The peacock appeared to be jealous of the new arrival."  

Also on June 10, 1926

- Boston police asked Jacksonville authorities to arrest and extradite Charles Ponzi, a get-rich-quick financier renting an apartment in the 1300 block of Main Street. "The dapper little Italian" faced a 10-year Massachusetts sentence.

- City Councilman J. Tom Rouse wheeled Harbormaster C.W. Herlong between the Post Office and Ocean and Bay streets in a wheelbarrow to pay off an election bet on Jerry Carter's unsuccessful challenge to Duncan Fletcher's U.S. Senate seat.

Bill Foley was a Times-Union reporter, editor and columnist for more than 40 years. He’s best known for his quirky columns about Jacksonville and Northeast Florida’s history. He wrote this series of Millennium Moments columns in 1999 leading up to the year 2000. Foley died in 2001 at age 62.