January 30-St. Augustine, FL

Ready for more than you wanted to know? OK, you asked for it! Forget Plymouth. Forget Jamestown. Enter: St. Augustine, Florida. Not much public relations work has been done here, but according to the president of the St. Augustine Historical Society (whom we talked to for about an hour) and the history books that are written without the political pull of the publishing companies, St. Augustine is the oldest, continuously occupied, European settlement in North America. Even the historians have admitted to numerous other earlier settlements, but St. Augustine is the first continuously occupied. The reason we don’t learn about this spot in favor of Plymouth and the Pilgrims seems to be partly public relations (Plymouth wins there!) and partly because St. Augustine was founded by Spain instead of England.

According to the National Park Service:

“Traveling aboard the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, 104 men landed in Virginia in 1607 at a place they named Jamestown. This was the first permanent English settlement in the New World.”
“Thirteen years later, 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts at a place they named Plymouth. With these two colonies, English settlement in North America was born.”
Well, that’s not the whole story, is it!?! Simply put in terms of time, we could say the children who helped found St. Augustine in 1565 were playing with their own grandchildren when the English stepped ashore in 1607 at what would become Jamestown!
Just a bit more, I promise: The earliest inhabitants of this area were Timucua Indians who predated the European “discovery” of the New World. One of the earliest European visitors to NE Florida was Spain’s Juan Ponce de Leon, who briefly landed between in 1513 (he was unsuccessfully searching for gold and the fountain of youth). In 1565, in response to the presence of a French Huguenot settlement on the NE Florida coast, Spanish naval commander Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles sailed for Florida to destroy the French colony at the mouth of the St. John. Menendez led his ships along Florida’s east coast, where he landed on September 8, 1565 (St. Augustine). He took possession of Florida in the name of Spain. Twelve days later, his force attacked the French colony and killed the occupants. If he hadn’t wiped them out we’d be talking about their settlement!
We’ve got a nasty history, don’t we! Disease brought by Europeans wiped out most of the Timucua…as it did with the native people all over North America.
Gene and I have been curious about this place for quite awhile. It’s a nice little town with lots of tourists. There are lovely art galleries, an amazing fort (Castillo de San Marcos), little tour trains, a beautiful harbor, and beaches with golden sand. It would be a good place to spend a vacation. We skipped the tourist stuff and found the Historical Society. We thought it was really interesting. I’m going to put a newspaper article on the blog for anyone who wants more…and so Gene and I can remember the details.