Tallahassee in History: A Guide to More than 100 Sites in Historical Context

By Rodney Carlisle and Loretta Carlisle

This unique guidebook, organized in chronological order, is a richly illustrated description of more than 100 sites in and around Tallahassee FLorida that together reveal the place of the city and region in history. The book details a wide variety of plantations, forts, homes, churches, streetscapes, museums, and historic ships. From Spanish exploration, second and third Colonial periods, Territorial Era, early statehood, Civil War, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, the 1890's through the 20s up until present time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pineapple Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781683340508

Rodney Carlisle

Rodney Carlisle is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author or editor of more than forty books.

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Introduction

Tallahassee in History

This guide to Tallahassee presents a different approach to guidebooks, arranging local sites in chronological historical order rather than in a street-by-street order. In this way, the homes, museums, civic buildings, churches, monuments, and other historic sites themselves become documents of the city’s and the region’s history. The format of this book follows others in our series of historical city guides that includes books on St. Augustine, Key West, Tampa, Charleston, and Savannah. Through these sites, the story of the city and the nearby region emerges as a historical account, documented not by paper sources and accounts but by things that the resident or out-of-town visitor can track down, walk around, and reflect on.

The history told here may not be a familiar one, as Tallahassee is known primarily as the state capital and the locale of three colleges and their facilities, rather than as a historic town like the others we have written about. Even so, the region offers many physical, three-dimensional documents of different phases of history, from ancient times to the present.

Local findings by archaeologists have uncovered skeletons of prehistoric animals, sites of ancient Native American villages and settlements, the specific physical location of a camping spot of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, and more. When the Spanish first sent Catholic missionaries to convert the Native American population to Christianity, one of their more successful efforts was at a spot now within the city limits of Tallahassee, a mission and fort at San Luis de Talimali that thrived in the late 1600s until the Apalachee fled from an English and Native American invasion in 1704.

Spain held Florida as a frontier colony, with a short period of British colonial control in the late 1700s. However, the Spanish made little attempt to send settlers to Florida, regarding it more as a military outpost to guard the more valuable colonies they held in the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America. The British, in their short period of control of Florida, sought to develop plantations in the regions near Jacksonville and St. Augustine and staffed a scattering of forts in the territory.

Late in the 1700s and in the early 1800s, during the second period of Spanish control of Florida, one faction of Creek Native Americans known as the Red Sticks fled their enemies, both other Native Americans and European American settlers in western Georgia. The early Red Stick Creeks who ran away to Florida were the first of several waves of refugee Native Americans who became known as Seminoles. They were joined by African Americans, escaping from slavery in Georgia and other states, in an underground railroad that pointed south (in contrast to the better-remembered northward flight to freedom). An American-born British loyalist from Maryland, William Augustus Bowles, attempted to set up an independent republic based not far from Tallahassee.

Some of the black refugees from the United States were encouraged and armed by British agents during the British-American War of 1812 (1812–1815). When the British troops departed at the end of that war, they left a well-equipped fort, largely manned by former African American slaves who had settled in the forest to the southwest of Tallahassee, along the Apalachicola River.

The story of that Negro Fort and its destruction by American troops, as well as of later raids headed by General Andrew Jackson, is told through the remains of the fort. Markers, displays of artifacts, and documented information in local museums, especially one at the site of a former fort at St. Marks, Florida, spell out this and other stories from the period.

After the Spanish decided to sell the whole territory of Florida to the United States in 1821, a commission chose Tallahassee as the site of the new territorial capital. As a reward for his help during the American Revolution, and in anticipation of his tour of the United States, the U.S. Congress decided to grant the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman, a whole township of his choice on undeveloped or unsettled land. His adviser chose a township squarely next to the newly chosen site of the territorial capital, and it now makes up a large part of the city of Tallahassee.

The outlying region around Tallahassee quickly became part of the expanding cotton frontier, with wealthy planters establishing land claims and bringing in enslaved African Americans to work the land. Soon, the Middle Florida counties around Tallahassee came to resemble Georgia and South Carolina, with large plantations of thousands of acres worked by African American slaves.

In the decades that followed, the capital city of Tallahassee grew up, and the territory became a state in the United States with an elected (rather than presidentially appointed) governor. Today that early period is documented through some surviving elegant mansions, churches, banks, and, later, railroad routes and connections to the sea and to the rest of the state.

During the Civil War (1861–1865), Florida joined the other Confederate slaveholding states and was tightly blockaded by the U.S. Navy, operating out of Key West. There were few major battles in the state, with only one in the Tallahassee area. The state capital did not fall to Union troops and was quietly occupied at the end of the war.

Through the period after the Civil War to the 1890s, the African American population of Tallahassee increased as former slaves from the nearby plantations resettled in the city. Colleges and churches were built. Some abandoned plantations were purchased as hunting preserves, while a few others were restored as historic sites and eventually opened to visitors. In the early twentieth century, with the coming of automobiles and paved highways, the capital city became more accessible, as its character as a college town emerged. Nearby communities like Havana and Quincy flourished from new business opportunities, with some elegant homes built by newly minted millionaires.

Housing developments and commercial districts filled in the city over the decades, resulting in its present appearance, with dozens of fast-food and small restaurants serving the thousands of students and state government workers. Meanwhile, the African American community produced a leadership class that continued to work for educational opportunities and civil rights.

Each phase of this history can be uncovered and understood visually by visiting the sites and contemplating the tales that they quietly tell.

1First People, Spanish Exploration, and Colonization

Prior to the landings of the first Spanish explorers in Florida in the early 1500s, Native American people had occupied the peninsula for thousands of years. Archeologists are still uncovering details of these pre-Columbian people through discoveries of artifacts, village remains, and mounds. The first settlement of Florida by humans is thought to date back to about 7500 BCE, when Paleoindians moved to the region and may have hunted large prehistoric animals such as giant armadillos, mammoths, and giant bison.

When the first Native Americans settled in the peninsula that is now Florida, the land extended far east and west, making the peninsula perhaps as much as three or four hundred miles wide in places. For this reason, many of the sites occupied by ancient Native Americans are now submerged far out to sea. However, just fifteen miles south of Tallahassee, at Wakulla Springs, careful scientific excavations have uncovered Stone Age tools and remains of some of the ancient animals that prehistoric Native Americans hunted in the region.

Mastodon. This skeleton of a prehistoric mastodon at the Museum of Florida History was recovered from nearby Wakulla Springs in 1930.

Mastodon. This skeleton of a prehistoric mastodon at the Museum of Florida History was recovered from nearby Wakulla Springs in 1930.

Native American Culture Periods in the Tallahassee Region

Currently, archaeologists designate the following periods of early Native American culture in the Tallahassee region:

First People, or Paleoindians. From about 18,000 to 11,000 BCE (before the Common Era), these were the first humans who may have hunted mammoths, giant tortoises, and other giant animals in North America.

Archaic people. From about 7500 to 500 BCE, these groups included the Norwood Culture, which lasted from about 2300 to 500 BCE. The Norwood Culture was located around what is now Tallahassee. The people of this culture hunted with spears and made designs with Spanish moss or palmetto fiber on wet clay before firing their pottery.

Deptford, Swift Creek, and Weeden Island cultures. Appearing in Florida from about 500 BCE to 1200 CE (in the Common Era), people in these cultures generally lived near freshwater sources, cultivated corn and other crops, showed increasing use of ornamented ceramic pottery, and also engaged in overland trade.

Fort Walton Culture. Lasting from about 1200 to 1500 CE, this culture is named for an archaeological site near Fort Walton Beach, west of Tallahassee. These people continued to raise corn, storing the surplus for winter use, as well as squash and beans. Mound building and new varieties of pottery show that this culture was influenced by (or was part of) the Mississippian culture in the lands that stretch from present-day Oklahoma through Alabama.

The Fort Walton Culture was encountered in the Tallahassee region by the Narváez and de Soto expeditions among the Apalachee in the early 1500s, which found the native people proficient with bows and arrows, with the men dressed in leather breechcloths and the women wearing skirts of Spanish moss.

Long before the first Spanish explorers landed in Florida in the early 1500s, Native Americans had developed a settled way of life centered on villages. Like prehistoric Native Americans in other towns and villages elsewhere in what is now the southeastern United States, the Florida natives erected large mounds. In a village, the largest mound would sometimes be topped by a temple or a roughly conical council house. At the Lake Jackson Mounds site just north of downtown Tallahassee, remains of seven mounds have been located. Artifacts from that site indicate the native people there were part of a wider culture, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex of the larger Mississippian Culture that stretched from what is now Georgia and Alabama west to Oklahoma. Throughout the larger region, communities of early Native Americans built mounds and engaged in long-distance trade.

By the era of Spanish exploration and contact with the Native Americans, the region around Tallahassee was occupied by the Apalachee people. As the Spanish explorers who landed in the Tampa Bay region demanded to know where they could find gold, natives pointed north