Crossing the St. Johns River at Lake Jesup shaped both travel and the environment over time. Before 1900, people and goods moved almost exclusively by steamboat on the St. Johns, serving several large wharves around Lake Jesup, but new roads and railroads gradually reduced that traffic. In 1911, Congress passed an act protecting navigation on Lake Jesup, and a ferry served the Geneva to Sanford road north of the present bridge. Around 1915, the road was bricked and widened to 8 feet. In 1920, the river's channel was dredged between Lake Harney and Lake Monroe, still passing around the oxbow within Lake Jesup. The first bridge, built in 1927, restricted navigation to passage beneath a turnstile drawbridge. In 1946, SR 46 was widened and a bypass channel was dug, and the drawbridge was replaced with a low fixed concrete span over one channel while the rest of the crossing over the floodplain was filled with a dirt causeway. Water flow suffered, and Lake Jesup's condition declined. The community pressed for a more environmentally sound crossing, and in 2010 the FDOT completed the current bridge where the old causeway had stood, restoring wetlands and removing pollutants from former fish camps and the old roadway. Dedicated by the 2006 Legislature as the George C. Means Memorial Bridge, it honors a Lake Jesup activist and lifelong advocate for a new bridge that would restore hydraulic exchange between the river and lake. The 3,740 foot structure bearing his name achieved that goal and was engineered for the environment.