Colonial History

Tradition holds that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, as English Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts shared a bountiful harvest with their Native American neighbors.

The first Thanksgiving celebration in North America actually took place in Florida.

Fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, colonists in St. Augustine shared a feast of thanksgiving with Native Americans.

Florida historian Michael Gannon, who died on April 10, 2017 at the age of 89, found documents supporting Florida’s claim to the “real” first Thanksgiving celebration.

“Not until 42 years later would English Jamestown be founded,” Gannon said. “Not until 56 years later would the Pilgrims in Massachusetts observe their famous Thanksgiving. St. Augustine’s settlers celebrated the nation’s first Thanksgiving over a half century earlier, on September 8, 1565. Following a religious service, the Spaniards shared a communal meal with the local native tribe.”

Hosting the first Thanksgiving celebration in what would become the United States is one of many “firsts” for the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in America, founded 452 years ago.

“When the Spaniards founded St. Augustine, they proceeded to found our nation’s first city government, first school, first hospital, first city plan, first Parrish church, and first mission to the native populations,” Gannon said.

In 1965, Gannon was a priest and historian in St. Augustine, leading several projects to help celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the city. He oversaw the erection of the Great Cross on the site of the first religious service and thanksgiving feast in North America. At 208 feet tall, the stainless steel structure is the largest freestanding cross in the Western Hemisphere.

“It was decided to build a cross, because that was central to the original ceremony, where Father Francisco López, the fleet chaplain, soon to be first pastor of the first Parrish, came ashore ahead of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the leader of the founding expedition, and then went forward to meet Menéndez holding a cross,” said Gannon. “Menéndez came on land, knelt and kissed the cross.”

Every year, the September 8, 1565 landing of Menéndez and the Catholic Mass that followed is reenacted in St. Augustine with dignitaries from around the world in attendance.

Today, visitors to the first permanent European settlement in North America can see a statue of Father Francisco López in front of the Great Cross. The statue is placed on the approximate site where Father López held the first Catholic Mass in the city, which was attended by Native Americans. Following the service, the European settlers and the native people shared a Thanksgiving meal.

The statue of Father López is carved out of indigenous coquina stone, a sedimentary rock comprised of compressed shells. The rough surface of the coquina symbolizes the difficult journey the Spanish endured on their voyage to Florida.

“That statue was erected in the 1950s. It was executed by a distinguished Yugoslav sculptor, Ivan Meštrović,” said Gannon. “But it was placed in a copse of trees where it did not stand out against a dark background. The plan that the architects in 1965 came forward with was to move it to a site on open ground where the figure of Father López, with his arms in the air, would stand out against the sky. And now, at long last, the statue has been moved to that space. You can see the dramatic difference in the figure of Father López as he’s seen completely and clearly now against the sky, and directly in front of the Great Cross, which stands behind him.”

The Spanish had only just arrived in St. Augustine when their Thanksgiving dinner was served, and they did not have the benefit of having raised crops for a year as the English Pilgrims did more than half a century later.

The Spanish had to do the best they could with leftovers from their long voyage.

“The menu was a stew of salted pork and garbanzo beans, accompanied with ship’s bread and red wine,” said Gannon.

While Floridians should proudly proclaim ownership of the first Thanksgiving celebration held in what would become the United States, we may want to retain the traditional menu of turkey, stuffing, vegetables, and cranberry sauce.

On August 15, 1559, Spanish conquistador Don Tristan de Luna sailed into what is now Pensacola Bay, leading a fleet of twelve ships with 1,500 colonists on board. Their effort to establish a permanent settlement was thwarted by a violent hurricane, which devastated the fleet.

One of the shipwrecks was discovered by underwater archaeologists in 1992, and another in 2006, but until recently, the terrestrial site of the attempted Luna settlement remained a mystery.

“We’re fortunate that we have a letter that Luna wrote after the hurricane, to the King of Spain, describing the storm,” says Greg Cook, assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of West Florida. “He said that it raged for twenty-four hours, it hit during the night, with great loss of ships and lives and property, and we know that many of their supplies were destroyed.”

The Emmanuel Point I and Emmanuel Point II shipwrecks continue to provide archaeologists and archaeology students the opportunity to discover artifacts such as stone cannon balls, copper arrow tips to be used with crossbows, ceramics including olive jars, and the bones of livestock, rats, and pet cats.

“What I really like and get excited about are the items that have a personal touch, that tell something about the story,” says John Bratten, chair of the UWF anthropology department. “This is a wooden spoon, it’s probably made out of olive wood, but this would have been a sailor’s personal spoon that he would have carried with him and that he would use to eat. They didn’t have forks. They probably had a knife and a spoon, and that’s what they did.”

Bratten also points out the clear impression of a fingerprint left in a brick more than 450 years ago. The brick was aboard one of Luna’s sunken ships.

While the Luna shipwrecks have yielded fascinating artifacts for decades, it wasn’t until last fall that the exact location of the oldest multi-year European settlement in the United States was discovered in a Pensacola neighborhood.

Former UWF archaeology student Tom Garner was driving through the neighborhood when he saw a cleared lot where a house had been torn down. For 30 years, Garner made a practice of investigating such sites, just to see if any artifacts might have been uncovered.

This time, Garner’s curiosity was rewarded.

“The initial artifact that I found was an olive jar, a fragment, the neck from an olive jar,” says Garner. “These are large, ceramic storage jars for food. They’re very common, one of the most common artifacts on Spanish colonial sites. I understood that that could potentially be Luna, we’re in a spot close to the shipwrecks, but olive jars go as late as maybe 1800 or so, so it wasn’t necessarily Luna. I contacted the University of West Florida archaeology department, and they came and confirmed what it was.”

This summer, professional archaeologists and archaeology students have been working at selected sites throughout the Pensacola neighborhood, excavating artifacts from the Luna settlement.

“We’ve found lots of broken pots,” says Elizabeth Benchley, director of the UWF archaeology institute. “What we hope to be able to find, are areas where different groups of colonists lived together, after the hurricane.” Among the colonists were single soldiers, families, and Aztec Indians from Mexico. “We haven’t found the boundaries of the site yet. We’re still trying to find the edges of where these artifacts are distributed.”

After the 1559 hurricane, life was very difficult for the Luna colonists. The settlement was abandoned in 1561.

“We’re hoping that as we do archaeology here, we can actually see the trash pits, which may give us some evidence as to how they survived,” says UWF associate anthropology professor John Worth.

The exact location of the Luna settlement is being protected for now, but the archaeology work is difficult to miss if you drive through the neighborhood. Carefully dug trenches are apparent in the yards of residential properties.

“Tristan de Luna is this mythical figure in Pensacola,” says neighborhood liaison Tom Garner. “People are thrilled to be part of this project. The response has been tremendous. There’s some bragging going on these days about living in the oldest neighborhood in the United States.”
 

St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in what is now the United States.

By the time Jamestown was established and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the people who originally founded St. Augustine were having grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded the city of St. Augustine on September 8, 1565.

Menéndez was personally motivated to come to Florida in search of his son Juan, whose ship was lost off the coast here. The Spanish Crown was anxious for Menéndez to reclaim La Florida from the French Huguenots, who had established a settlement called Fort Caroline near present day Jacksonville.

It was almost an accident that the Spanish found out about Fort Caroline.

“It really was the hungry stomachs at Fort Caroline that ultimately led to the Spanish finding out that the French were in Florida,” says colonial historian Susan Parker, director of the St. Augustine Historical Society.

“These hungry soldiers left Fort Caroline, thinking they could sail back to France in this small boat that they had. They were captured off the coast of Cuba. The Cuban officials find out that there’s this French colony in La Florida and send the information back to Spain. So it’s something as simple as a growling stomach that leads to a huge international situation.”

The Catholic Spanish believed that the Protestant French were heretics and had wrongly invaded their territory. Menéndez successfully slaughtered the French colonists, keeping alive only a handful of musicians and a few hasty converts to Catholicism.

He never found any trace of his shipwrecked son.

St. Augustine is the site of many “firsts” for what is now the United States.

America’s first Christian church, first hospital, and first school were all established in St. Augustine. This country’s first city plan was developed there. The street systems found on maps from 1586 still exist today.

“I think what’s so amazing about St. Augustine after 450 years of being an active town that people live in, is that it’s still here, and it’s still tiny,” says James Cusick, curator at the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History.

Many of St. Augustine’s narrow streets are a challenge for modern vehicular traffic.

“It’s survived not as a big metropolis, but as a tiny, tiny little place for 450 years. That’s incredible,” Cusick says. “If you walk around the town today, you can get a sense, I think still, of what the Colonial Era was like here.”

Construction on St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos began in 1672. The imposing Spanish fortress is the only one in existence on the North American mainland. The fort successfully defended the city from numerous attacks over the centuries, but was perhaps not quite as formidable as it appeared, armed with outdated weaponry.

“I’ve wondered how many attacks were never made or even considered because of the existence of the Castillo,” says Parker. “The English, or perhaps the French, or even the Americans later on are not quite sure that they’ll be able to withstand the canon fire from the Castillo, never knowing that the canon didn’t operate very well.”

The 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine has been commemorated all year, culminating this week with concerts, art exhibitions, and a reenactment of the first landing of Menéndez. Historic reenactors from Florida Living History and the Men of Menendez, part of the Historic Florida Militia, played active roles.

Chad Light has earned recognition as the modern embodiment of Menéndez, appearing in television commercials, a one-man theatrical presentation, on billboards, Facebook, and at special events including official anniversary celebrations sponsored by the city. He regularly portrays Menéndez at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, where excavations have uncovered the original St. Augustine settlement.

A true Renaissance Man, Light created a bronze sculpture of Menéndez, unveiled just in time for the 450th anniversary commemoration.

“Some of us may see a fifty year benchmark in our city’s birthday more than once in our lifetime, hopefully so,” says Light. “But for us, it’s the only time it will happen as we are adults and can do something to celebrate it. The responsibility is on us, and for many of us it is a passion.”

In 1738, the first legally sanctioned free black settlement was established in what would become the United States.

El Pueblo de Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, popularly known as Fort Mose, was a community of former slaves who pledged allegiance to the King of Spain, became Catholic, and agreed to defend Spanish controlled Florida from invaders.

Located just north of St. Augustine, Fort Mose was the first line of defense against attack from British colonies. 

As part of the War of Jenkins Ear between Spain and Great Britain, General James Oglethorpe led an invading force into Spanish Florida. In the early morning of June 26, 1740, that invasion was repelled at Fort Mose.

Since 2010, an annual reenactment of the Bloody Battle of Fort Mose has been staged at Fort Mose Historic State Park. Several groups of reenactors participate in the event, coordinated by Florida Living History, Inc.

“This is a reenactment of the surprise attack, in June of 1740, that the Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, the black militia from Fort Mose, and Yamasee auxiliaries launched to recapture the Fort Mose site from British and Scottish invaders from Georgia and Carolina,” says Davis Walker, president of Florida Living History, Inc.

“The attack was launched just before dawn,” says Walker. “The defending forces were caught completely by surprise and basically massacred.”

The Bloody Battle of Fort Mose successfully ended Oglethorpe’s siege of St. Augustine, and returned control of Florida to the Spanish.

Fort Mose was destroyed during the battle, and it would take twelve years to rebuild the outpost.

Florida Living History, Inc. presents a variety of historical reenactments throughout the year, but the Bloody Battle of Fort Mose allows collaboration with other groups. British and Scottish reenactors come from Fort King George and Fort Frederica in Georgia. People portraying Spanish soldiers come from all over Florida. The Fort Mose Militia provides black soldiers, and Yamasee Indian reenactors come from Tampa and St. Augustine to participate.

“We’ve always thought that this would make such a unique living history event because it involves European, black, and Native American elements,” says Walker. “Happily, our friends at the Florida Park Service and here at Fort Mose encourage that very strongly, and have been working hand and hand with us to grow this event. Also, the Fort Mose Historical Society, a volunteer group that supports the park, has taken part.”

Andrew Batten, director of attractions at the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, travels to St. Augustine to participate in the Bloody Battle of Mose reenactment. Batten portrays a member of the South Carolina Rangers, one of Oglethorpe’s militiamen. There were about twice as many Spanish troops at Fort Mose as there were British soldiers.

“You have four different (British) units within this, all doing things different ways,” says Batten. “The other problem is that you have soldiers like myself, who are trying to make a little money on the side. If I capture Spanish horses, I can sell them to the British army, and I can make much more money doing that than I can doing my job. So the South Carolinians who are here, unfortunately, were poorly led, they had poor morale, very poor discipline, so you see the results in what became known as Bloody Mose. Of the 137 British troops here, 25 got out unharmed or uncaptured or alive.”

Fort Mose Historic State Park, a National Historic Landmark, is where the battle reenactment takes place each year. A boardwalk takes visitors to marshlands where the original Fort Mose stood. The battle reenactment takes place on uplands adjacent to the marsh.

A museum at the site tells the story of America’s first free black settlement.

“We have a $750,000 interactive and interpretive museum where the exhibits actually respond to your movement throughout,” says Thomas Jackson, vice-president of the Fort Mose Historical Society.

The museum is open 9am to 5pm Thursday through Monday, and is closed Tuesday and Wednesday.

In addition to the Bloody Battle of Fort Mose reenactment in June, the Fort Mose Historical Society presents Living History programs during the last weekend of every month. These programs include demonstrations of food, the firing of muskets, and portrayals of historic figures.
 

William Bartram fought alligators, befriended Seminoles, and meticulously documented the flora and fauna of eighteenth century Florida.

His book “Travels through North and South Carolina, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians,” known today as “Bartram’s Travels,” is a classic work of Florida literature.

William Bartram was a naturalist, botanist, artist, and explorer who followed in the footsteps of his father, John Bartram.

“Without his father’s influence, William would have never gotten interested in botany,” says J.D. Sutton, actor and author of the one-man play “William Bartram: Puc Puggy’s Travels in Florida.”

“Following the French and Indian War when Spain ceded Florida to England, John Bartram had been named botanist to the King of England. He charged John to explore the Florida territory to see what might be there, what the potentials were in the country,” says Sutton.

In 1765, the 14 year old William Bartram joined his father on an expedition up the St. Johns River. William was so taken with Florida that he attempted to establish himself as a farmer at Fort Picolata, but the effort failed. He returned to Florida in 1774 as part of a four year trek through what is now the southeastern United States, documenting the plants, animals, and inhabitants of the region.

Bartram sailed to Amelia Island and toured Indian mounds. He took the Intracoastal Waterway to the St. Johns River, exploring the area that would become Jacksonville. He traveled up and down the St. Johns River and visited what are now Micanopy, the Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, Astor, and Blue Spring. Later in 1774, he traveled the Suwannee River.

While collecting seeds and meticulously documenting Florida’s natural environment, Bartram interacted with Seminole Indians. He found the native population to be very friendly and welcoming. The Seminoles gave Bartram the nickname “Puc Puggy,” which means ‘flower hunter.”

“I think it was kind of a put down which he didn’t quite get,” says Sutton. “He was just honored to be named ‘the flower hunter’ by the chief, and given permission to explore the territory around Tuscawilla for collecting medicinal herbs and plants, and writing about them and identifying them, and sending them on to England and to his father’s garden in Philadelphia.”

Part of what makes Bartram’s “Travels” such a useful resource and engaging work today are its detailed drawings. Bartram was a skilled artist.

“He was a brilliant illustrator,” says Sutton. “His drawing of the franklinia tree that they found on the Altamaha River is probably his best known. But he did pages and pages of illustrations which were then hand-colored and sent to his patron in London. They’re still there in the British Museum.”

When Bartram’s “Travels” was first published in 1791, it was not universally praised. Some critics found the writing style overly Romantic. Some doubted the authenticity of Bartram’s accounts of his fighting with snakes and alligators, and his relations with the Seminoles. The Florida that Bartram described seemed so exotic to some readers that they compared his book to the fantasy “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift.

Bartram’s “Travels” is admired and respected by modern audiences.

“It’s a great time capsule of what Florida was like in the mid-1700s,” says Sutton.

“He talks about flocks of the Carolina parakeet so numerous they block the sun. We don’t have that anymore, because they’re extinct, but we’ve got that visual image of what it was like. He describes gopher tortoises, which they hadn’t seen before, that are so big that a man could stand on top of them. They’re wonderful images, and that’s what makes Bartram fun.”

J.D. Sutton will perform his one-man show “William Bartram: Puc Puggy’s Travels in Florida” at Harry P. Leu Botanical Gardens in Orlando, Thursday, April 16 at 7:00 pm. The free performance is presented by the Orange Audubon Society. Sutton’s Chautauqua-style presentation includes an interactive element with the actor answering audience questions as William Bartram.

Bartram would feel right at home among the lush Florida foliage of Leu Gardens.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

A fleet of ships carrying 1,500 colonists sailed into what is now Pensacola Bay on August 15, 1559. The men, women, and children aboard the ships were led by Spanish conquistador Don Tristan de Luna.

De Luna’s plan was to establish the first permanent European colony in North America. He called the settlement site Ochuse, La Florida. We call it Pensacola, Florida. The colony at Ochuse was to be the first in a series of settlements that would spread west along the gulf coast and north into the heart of the continent, securing the territory for Spain.

Before the colonists could finish unloading their ships, a violent hurricane struck, sinking the fleet.

Although the colonists persevered for two years in difficult circumstances, de Luna was forced to abandon his attempted settlement in 1561. The colonists were dispersed to Mexico, Cuba, and Spain.

Today, de Luna’s misfortune is providing amazing research opportunities for professional archaeologists and students at the University of West Florida. The Emanuel Point Shipwreck Site was discovered at the bottom of Pensacola Bay in 1992, revealing two ships from de Luna’s doomed colonization attempt.

Every summer, the University of West Florida conducts a field school at the Emanuel Point Shipwreck Site, allowing students to dive in teams, searching for lost artifacts in the murky water.

“Both ships are very well preserved. They are both buried to various degrees,” says UWF faculty member Gregory Cook. “A variety of items have been found on both of them, from armaments, to supplies, faunal remains, animal remains, plant remains.”

Among the most exciting items to be excavated from the de Luna ships are stone cannon balls, copper arrow tips to be used with a crossbow, and a small wooden carving in the shape of a Spanish galleon.

“We’re continually surveying and searching for other vessels in the fleet,” Cook says. “It’s really pretty unprecedented to have two vessels and possibly as many as four or five in the bay from a single fleet.”

The discovery of the Emanuel Point Shipwreck Site confirmed conclusions drawn by Pensacola author John Appleyard in his 1977 historical novel “De Luna: Founder of North America’s First Colony.”

Appleyard carefully studied all of the available documentation of de Luna’s expedition, and determined the correct location of de Luna’s landing site. Two other popular theories placing the settlement attempt at different locations were shown to be incorrect by the archaeological discoveries in Pensacola Bay.

Like any writer of good historical fiction, Appleyard logically fills any gaps in demonstrable fact with reasonable supposition and a slight bit of artistic license. A new paperback edition of his novel was published by the Florida Historical Society Press for the 450^th anniversary of de Luna’s attempted colony.

In addition to being a writer, Appleyard was one of the first successful proponents of cultural and heritage tourism in Florida, helping to organize the Fiesta of Five Flags.

“De Luna was a historical figure that had largely been lost in the pages of history,” says Appleyard. “In 1949, a group of local businessmen came together recognizing that Pensacola needed something of a magnet for tourism. Someone suggested that a Fiesta, an annual celebration be held, and that de Luna become the magnet at the center of it.”

Since 1950, the Fiesta of Five Flags has been held every year in Pensacola. A series of events recognizes de Luna’s attempted colony and the Spanish, French, British, Confederate, and American flags that have flown over Florida.

St. Augustine, established by Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565, is recognized as the oldest continuous European settlement in North America. Had de Luna been able to create a permanent colony at Pensacola six years earlier and expand northward and westward as he had planned, American history may have been quite different.

The power of a hurricane should never be underestimated.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.