After spending several days in New York City, I didn’t stay put for very long. Serena had planned a weekend getaway for us to St. Augustine, Florida (“You’ve lived in Florida for over 20 years and never been to St. Augustine??!!!”) so that I (apparently) wouldn’t be the only oddball in Florida who has never visited what many people (Serena included) consider Florida’s prettiest city. So despite my disdain for drives of over three hours, we (well, Serena, actually) hopped behind the wheel last weekend and we were off to visit the oldest city in the United States.
St. George Street, St. Augustine
More precisely, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States; because, as we all know (right?), numerous indigenous communities existed on this land we call the United States for centuries before 1565. But it is actually the second-oldest continuously inhabited city of European origin in a United States territory, after San Juan, Puerto Rico (founded in 1521).
St. Augustine was founded on September 8, 1565, by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Florida’s first governor. He named the settlement San Agustín, because his ships bearing settlers, troops, and supplies from Spain had first sighted land in Florida eleven days earlier on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine. The city served as the capital of Spanish Florida for over 200 years.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris, signed after Great Britain’s victory over France and Spain during the Seven Years’ War, ceded Florida to Great Britain (I had no idea!) in exchange for the return of Havana and Manila. Many Spanish settlers in the region left Florida for Cuba and, because of the political sympathies of its British inhabitants, St. Augustine became a Loyalist haven during the American Revolutionary War.
Castillo de San Marcos National Monument [View Gallery HERE]
The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which recognized the independence of the Thirteen Colonies as the United States, ceded Florida back to Spain and returned the Bahamas to Britain. As a result, some of the town’s Spanish residents returned to St Augustine. This group was, and still is, referred to locally as “Menorcans”, even though it also included settlers from Italy, Corsica and the Greek islands.
Menorcans is the name given collectively to a group of people from Greece, Italy, and Minorca (a small island off the coast of Spain) who were brought to Florida in 1768 by Scottish land-owner Dr. Andrew Turnbull as indentured servants to work on his 100,000-acre indigo plantation at New Smyrna, south of St. Augustine, for a period of nine years. Turnbull believed these laborers from across the Mediterranean would be best suited to Florida’s climate. The grueling 70-day voyage across the Atlantic, however, would claim the lives of 148 laborers.
Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine
In the nine year period of abuse and mistreatment that followed, nearly 1,000 of Turnbull’s workers died from malnutrition, malaria, scurvy, and gangrene. The remaining Menorcans sent a delegation to Saint Augustine to seek asylum. After walking the 70 miles to Saint Augustine, they met with the new English governor Patrick Tonyn who granted the asylum, giving them a small portion of the town to live in. About six hundred Menorcans fled to St. Augustine, leaving the ill-fated colony of New Smyrna in a shambles from which it would never recover.
In 1883, wealthy American industrialist Henry Flagler took an interest in St. Augustine with the idea to make St. Augustine a winter resort for wealthy Americans (who else?) from the north, and to bring them south he bought several short line railroads and combined these in 1885 to form the Florida East Coast Railway.
Funk outfit Tru Phonic at the Colonial Oak Music Park [View Gallery HERE]
When Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad was extended southward to Palm Beach and then Miami in the early 20th century, the wealthy stopped in St. Augustine en route to the southern resorts. As time went on, Miami and the South Florida area saw a huge building boom, and wealthy vacationers began to spend their winters in South Florida. St. Augustine nevertheless still attracted tourists, and eventually became a destination for families traveling in automobiles as new highways were built and Americans took to the road for annual winter and summer vacations.
The city would become a focal point of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Segregation of schools (despite the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of schools was unconstitutional), Ku Klux Klan violence, and the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. led to numerous organized marches and other forms of protest in St. Augustine. These courageous actions, spearheaded by African-American dentist Dr. Robert B. Hayling and activist Hosea Williams, had a direct impact on the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Potter’s Wax Museum
In 2015, St. Augustine celebrated the 450th anniversary of its founding with a four-day long festival and a visit from Felipe VI of Spain and Queen Letizia of Spain. It’s a charming enough city to visit with plenty of restaurants, shops, small historical museums and live music venues lining the streets of its historic center. We only spent a long weekend there but I’ll be sharing a few photo galleries in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned…
All photographs (except Serena at the beach) taken with my new/old Pentax K-1 using (mainly) the Pentax-D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 and Pentax SMCP-FA* 85mm f/1.4 lenses