Jackson Road Russell Island

Jacksonville Jackson Road

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This is the site of a settlement established by Mark Jackson in the 1920s. The Jackson family came to the island about 1905 and took up pineapple farming, one of the first farming families to do so. In 1915 Mark Jackson opened a pineapple cannery that employed up to 20 people in its heyday. It is famous for being one of the suppliers of canned pineapple to Allied troops fighting in France during World War I. Not long after World War I, the cannery closed and was replaced by a sawmill on the same site. Before the mill closed, it supplied timber for a number of island buildings, including a Methodist Church.

The pineapple cannery was built just above the high water mark, apparently because the equipment was too heavy to carry any further up the slope. Mark Jackson also built a jetty and a barge to take produce to the markets, as well as an enclosed swimming pool with a shark barrier. The remains of the structures can be found at the water’s edge below the site of the cannery and sawmill. No settlement is complete without entertainment, so Mark Jackson also built the Bay View Picture Theater about 1950. Jackson donated five acres for a school oval in 1922, which is today the Jackson’s Oval cricket ground. In its heyday, Jacksonville was one of the main transport nodes, with most of the fruit boats visiting the island in those days traveling along the aptly named Main Channel that runs between Redland Bay and Russell Island. They picked up and delivered passengers and produce from the Logan River, other southern bay islands and the mainland settlements. Little remains of the Jacksonville settlement: the Methodist Church was eaten by white ants and pulled down and the picture theater burnt down in 1960. All that is left of the pineapple cannery/sawmill are its leveled site and some remnants off Jackson Street. The remains of the jetty and barge can be found down on the water’s edge and some concrete block walls from the swimming enclosure are visible.