They called it Mud Island when it was born, made of sand and muck dredged from the river bottom as engineers carved a shipping channel in the St. Johns. It was big, growing to 34 acres, and it was wild, with rabbits bouncing and rattlesnakes slinking through the palmettos and scrub that came to cover it.

It stayed wild, even after well-meaning people tried to tame it a little: Over and over, vandals looted and shot up the structures built on it, so people gave up and left it to the rabbits and snakes.

In the 1950s, workers built the Mathews Bridge over it, connecting downtown Jacksonville and Arlington. Now, many a commuter could look down on old Mud Island and dream of detouring there for an hour or an afternoon or longer.

Finally, again, a plan is in the works to make that dream a little easier - at least for those who can paddle or motor out to the island.

The city of Jacksonville is going ahead with a project to make the land a city park called Exchange Club Island Park, more accessible and less wild. Within a few months, the city will seek bids for a floating dock at the southeast corner of the island, with an expected opening this year. Volunteers created a nature trail last summer. The city is trying to get a new grant to build a couple of picnic shelters in 2017.

A primitive camping area is also a possibility in the future. That wouldn't be anything new, actually: Generations of Arlington locals camped out there on their own anyway.

Melody Shacter, who can easily see the island from her riverfront house, said her sons often would hang out there and camp overnight on weekends. "They brought home baby rabbits from over there. There are a lot of rabbits there; I think it only takes two," she said.

The island gave her sons the chance to explore the wild and get away on their own. She wasn't worried about them.

"I could see their campfire from my window," Shacter said.

Brad Campbell, now 69, grew up near the Arlington boat ramp. As a boy, he built a 10-foot plywood boat to get to the island, and he and his buddies would look for fish and crabs and something else, too: "Adventure," he said.

His mother, Daphne Campbell, 93, still calls it Mud Island. She said she remembers buying crabs, a nickel each, from a woman named Tugboat Annie who lived out there.

That's just part of the colorful history of the island, which is one of a handful in Duval County that were created by dredging.

It was once home to an industrious squatter, R.H. Jones, and his wife, who was unnamed in news stories - perhaps she was Tugboat Annie. They lived there from 1940, soon after Mud Island was created, until 1955; he was a commercial fisherman and she did their shopping in her 12-foot outboard motorboat.

Mud Island made the news in 1956, after a businessman floated a plan to lease each end of it as home for some "spectacular" billboards. Duval's county commissioners weren't happy about that, so the state that year gave the island to the county so it could control it.

That ended the billboard plan, which seemed wrongheaded in so many ways. As the Jacksonville Journal noted a short time later, commissioners worried that it would be downright ugly. Plus, they "brought up the practical angle that a motorist driving a car over the steep bridge had no business peering over the side to read advertisements beneath."

By the late 1950s, Mud Island had become Exchange Club Island, named after the civic group that vowed to do something with the land. The club made good on its word, and on July 4, 1960, club members and others gathered on the island, walking from the mainland on a pontoon bridge built for the day.

There they found a new plaque noting that the watery paradise would henceforth be a place for "our Florida citizens and visitors in their enjoyment of our beautiful waterways, beaches and sunshine." Also new: a 20-by-40-foot frame building painted blue and white, along with picnic areas and restrooms. Dredging created little lagoons for boaters to anchor in on the south end.

It didn't take long for that idealistic project to be ruined. Vandals shattered or stole windows, burned holes in the floor, used planking and doors for firewood. They took large rocks and smashed the toilets. They shot up the building and stole barbecue grills. They left mounds of beer cans and trash.

Several times, do-gooders did repairs and picked up, but the vandals didn't rest. They even shot up the plaque.

LEFT TO BE WILD

By 1972, the city had had enough: Workers capped an artesian well that had been dug out there, and the island was left wild - even though developers kept proposing projects for it. One idea: a home for the elderly. Another: a "hippie colony." And how about a pedestrian bridge from the mainland?

In the years since, numerous other ideas have been floated, from the serious (a city-sponsored sailing school) to the impractical (a golf course), to the commercial (a "tropical paradise" for boaters).

Now come the new park improvements, just under the Mathews, which sees 56,000 cars a day.

Andrew Miller of the Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida has paddled there; his group backs the plans, seeing the island as a link in a paddling trail through Northeast Florida. Still, he'd like to see its development stay relatively low-key - it's valuable, he thinks, to have a mostly wild place so close to downtown, right across from EverBank Field and with a good view of the downtown skyline.

"It's the last place in the world that you'd expect to find a natural area, beneath the bridge of a major city," Miller said.

Under the Lenny Curry administration, it's seeking another grant from the navigation district to build picnic shelters and sidewalks from the boat dock. That $80,360 grant would be added to about $101,000 in city money.

Sigrid Masson, a stand-up paddleboard instructor at Black Creek Outfitters, has gone to the island several times, and cautioned that novice paddlers could get in trouble, what with boat traffic, tide changes and high winds. But if you know what you're doing, it's worth the trip, she said: "It's a fun paddle. It's just the island itself needs some work."

Vandals, it seems, continue to be an Exchange Club Island scourge - far worse than any rattlesnakes (some visitors say the place is crawling with them, others say they haven't seen any in years).

"People break bottles, try to chop down palm trees," Shacter said. "You definitely see the scars of wild humans, but you do get a little taste of wild Florida out there."

Richard Jacques Jr., 60, has spent his working life at the Arlington boat ramp just north of the island. He now works for Cross State Towing Co., based there. As a boy, he'd boat out to the island and chase rabbits with his pellet gun. He never got any.

His boss, Marvin Lane, 84, owner of Cross State Towing, can't remember the exact year, but he recalls towing a drilling rig on a barge to the south end of the island. It was used to dig the well for visitors to drink from.

"The bad people 'round here kept it tore up," Lane said. "They finally just capped the well off. That's what I understood: I haven't been out there to look at it, 'cause I know that island is full of rattlesnakes."

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082