Newspaper article about St. Augustine, FL

Facts mark our city’s singular place in history, by Susan Parker
Published in the St. Augustine Record, Feb 12, 2006


The English who planned and led the Jamestown settlement were well aware of our 42 year old town. The English settlement was located in response to the existence of St. Augustine. British historian Ralph Davis, a graduate of the London School of Economics, wrote that England’s King James told the Virginia settlers to keep well away from the Spanish in Florida. Davis asserted that the English would have preferred to settle farther south in a warmer climate with a longer growing season, but Spanish Florida and its capital of St. Augustine made that too risky.
The early settlers of St. Augustine were not the “lazy fellows” as foreigners accused. By 1607 they had built several church building and several forts in St. Augustine as well as churches in established Indian communities. After a fitful first seven years of settlement, St. A’s residents laid out the town and its streets that we still use today. They also kept records of the activities of officials and of the important events of ordinary lives. The oldest document of American origin in the US is the record in the books from the Cathedral of St. Augustine, of an infant baptism performed here in June 1594. The priests had recorded baptisms, marriages and burials of people of European and African ancestry and of Native Americans in earlier books that have been lost. The Cathedral Parish Records offer an almost continuous record of residents of our nation from that day in 1594 to the present.
The first “melting pot” in the United States took shape in St. A. Residents of all races, of many languages and from many places lived in this town. Spaniards had Indian wives. Blacks and Indians married each other. Indian laborers, shopkeepers and even prisoners-f-war walked St. A’s streets. Free and enslaved blacks had arrived on Menendez’s ships, and slaves were escaping from St. A to Indian towns before the establishment of Jamestown.
According to archivists at the Library of Congress, “the earliest engraving of any locality in the United States” is a map of St. A, published in London almost 20 years before the settling of Jamestown.
It is life’s irony that the map was generated by an attack in 1586 led by Englishman Francis Drake. It depicts building and cornfields before he burned them. Yes, the English of those days knew very well of the existence of St. Augustine.
In 1598, Florida’s governor established the oldest public space in the United States—our plaza. We still use this landmark common area for public ceremonies and celebrations. In the same year the governor established standard weights and measures to regulate the vendors in the plaza market. In 1599, a hospital was opened in St. A; in 1605 Franciscan friars started a seminary in St. A, the first school in today’s United States.
St. Augustine was the first to endure as a city and as a community and it still endures. But St. A was not the first at everything, so let us make our claims with caution and with knowledge.
Spaniards planted the settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape on the Georgia coast in 1526, almost 50 years before St. Augustine was founded. But it lasted only three months. Christian worship during both sad and glad times had been part of the doomed settlement. Spanish Pensacola hung on as a settlement for about 18 months following a disastrous beginning in 1559. Three years before the founding of St. A, the French established the settlement of Charlesfort on Parris Island in 1562 and then Fort Caroline in Jacksonville in 1564. But these settlements did not last. St. A did—and that endurance is what makes ours the oldest city.
The attention to history arising from the Jamestown commemoration presents an opportunity for St. Augustine to present itself to the nation.
We should do so on our own credentials, not as a response to Jamestown. Many factors contribute to our uphill struggle to get the historically correct recognition that St. Augustine merits. It is my belief that it is in the classrooms of the United States where our case must be made.
We must convince the textbook publishers to include St. Augustine and inform the teachers. I am too often astounded at how many well-educated adults will hold tight to what they learned about history in elementary school, even in the face of solid facts.
We also should take notice that 10 years ago Virginia’s then governor began the planning for the Jamestown anniversary with statewide participation and support. In a little less than 10 years---2015—St Augustine will celebrate its 450th birthday. We should be planning now.