FLFlorida History

Shell cities, mound towns, and the nations that vanished

St. Augustine was already fifty five years old when the Mayflower reached Massachusetts. Long before that the Calusa of the southwest coast built islands out of oyster shell, cut canals through them, and fed tens of thousands of people almost entirely on fish and shellfish rather than farming. The Apalachee grew maize around what is now Tallahassee, the Timucua held the north, the Tequesta the mouth of the Miami River. Within two centuries of contact, disease, slave raiding out of Carolina and war had reduced almost all of them to nothing. The Seminole are a later people rather than a surviving older one, formed during the eighteenth century from Muscogee and Hitchiti speakers moving south into emptied land together with Black people escaping slavery in the British colonies.

Two centuries under Spain, twenty years under Britain

Juan Ponce de Leon landed in April 1513 and named the place La Florida for the Spanish Easter season. A French Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns in 1564 pushed Madrid into permanent occupation, and Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine on September 8, 1565, then wiped out the French garrison. Its defence, the Castillo de San Marcos, went up between 1672 and 1695 out of coquina, a soft shell limestone that absorbed cannonballs instead of shattering. Spanish policy also produced something remarkable in 1738: people who escaped slavery in the Carolinas and accepted Catholicism were granted freedom and settled at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black community in what became the United States. Its militia helped repel the British attack of 1740.

Years	Governed by	How it changed hands
1513 to 1763	Spain	Claimed by Ponce de Leon, settled from 1565
1763 to 1783	Great Britain	Traded to Britain in exchange for Havana
1783 to 1821	Spain	Returned at the end of the American Revolution
1821 to 1861	United States	Ceded under the Adams-Onis Treaty
1861 to 1865	Confederate States	Seceded January 10, 1861
1865 onward	United States	Occupied, then readmitted June 25, 1868

Adams-Onis, the Seminole wars, and statehood in 1845

Britain held Florida for twenty years after 1763, split it in two, and watched both halves stay loyal through the Revolution. Spain took it back in 1783 and could not govern it. Andrew Jackson invaded in 1818, hanged two British subjects and seized Pensacola, and Madrid concluded the place cost more than it was worth. The Adams-Onis Treaty, signed February 22, 1819 and ratified in 1821, transferred Florida in return for the United States assuming up to five million dollars in claims by its own citizens and abandoning its claim to Texas. Tallahassee became the territorial capital in 1824 because it sat halfway between St. Augustine and Pensacola. The Second Seminole War then ran from 1835 to 1842, the longest and costliest Indian war in American history; Osceola was seized in October 1837 under a flag of truce and died in prison four months later. Statehood came on March 3, 1845, the 27th state, balanced by free Iowa the next year.

Secession, Olustee, and the capital nobody took

Florida left the Union on January 10, 1861, third to go, though with barely 140,000 residents it supplied salt and cattle more than soldiers. Coastal works boiled seawater around the clock for the Confederate commissariat, and herds driven north out of the central prairie fed armies in Georgia and Tennessee. The largest battle inside the state was Olustee on February 20, 1864, a Union defeat near Lake City. At Natural Bridge on March 6, 1865 a scratch force including cadets from the West Florida Seminary held the crossing, which left Tallahassee the only Confederate capital east of the Mississippi never captured.

Flagler's rails, the 1928 hurricane, and a state that multiplied by seven

Henry Flagler, who had built Standard Oil alongside John D. Rockefeller, came to St. Augustine in the 1880s and stayed to build hotels and a railroad to reach them. His Florida East Coast line pushed to Biscayne Bay in April 1896, and Miami incorporated three months later with fewer than four hundred voters. The Key West Extension, carried over open water on concrete arches, was finished in January 1912 and destroyed by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. Cheap rail and hard salesmanship produced the land boom of the mid 1920s and its collapse. On September 16, 1928 a hurricane pushed Lake Okeechobee over its low muck dike and killed roughly 2,500 people, most of them Black farm workers in the Glades, which brought the Herbert Hoover Dike and the drainage engineering that reshaped the Everglades.

Florida had about 2.8 million residents in 1950 and has more than 21 million now, and the two technologies most responsible are window air conditioning and organised mosquito control. The rest was federal money and migration. The first rocket lifted off Cape Canaveral in July 1950, Apollo 11 left on July 16, 1969, and Challenger broke apart over the same coast on January 28, 1986. Walt Disney World opened near Orlando on October 1, 1971 on land assembled in secret. Cubans arriving after 1959, the Freedom Flights of 1965 to 1973 and the Mariel boatlift of 1980 turned Miami bilingual, and in December 2000 the state decided a presidential election by 537 votes.

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