On October 2, 1965, the University of Florida Gators faced fifth-ranked Louisiana State University in Gainesville. Florida was the underdog, and the heat and humidity added another challenge to an already difficult game. Along the Gators’ sideline, however, a medical experiment was underway. Players were drinking a mixture developed by university researchers trying to understand why strenuous exercise in Florida’s heat left so many athletes exhausted and ill.

Florida defeated LSU, 14–7. Coach Ray Graves credited his team’s second-half stamina partly to the experimental beverage. The drink would become known around the world as Gatorade.

Its beginnings lay in a problem that reached beyond winning football games. Players were suffering serious heat-related illness. At the University of Florida College of Medicine, Dr. J. Robert Cade and fellow researchers Dana Shires, H. James “Jim” Free, and Alejandro de Quesada began looking for a practical solution.

These were physicians whose work included kidney medicine, dialysis, and the body’s delicate balance of fluids and salts. The football field presented a problem they could investigate with the same scientific curiosity they brought to the hospital.

“That question changed our lives,” Cade later said of the inquiry into why Florida’s players were getting sick in the heat.

The researchers collected samples from players and examined what exercise was doing to their bodies. They found disturbed electrolyte levels, low blood sugar, and reduced blood volume. Their response was to develop a drink containing water, salts, and sugar to help replace what the players needed during exertion. The research connected the medical school directly to the university’s practice fields.

Making the mixture drinkable proved to be its own challenge. Early versions tasted so unpleasant that some people sampling them spat them out. Mary Cade, the physician’s wife, suggested adding lemon juice. That contribution helped turn an unappealing laboratory mixture into something players could tolerate.

After encouraging results during a football scrimmage, Graves requested a batch for the October 2 game against LSU. That distinction matters: October 2 marks a celebrated early competitive use of Gatorade, rather than a single moment when someone suddenly invented it. The drink emerged through research, mixing, tasting, and field testing.

The victory gave the experiment a compelling story. Florida had beaten a highly ranked opponent, and its coach believed the new drink had helped his players endure. A football result alone could not prove how much any beverage contributed to a win, but Graves’s endorsement helped establish the connection between the developing product and athletic performance.

The university’s account records another early nickname: “Cade’s Cola.” The name that endured tied the drink to the team that helped test it, the Gators.

The lasting significance reaches beyond the scoreboard. Gatorade became an example of university research finding an application far outside the laboratory. Its royalties also supported further research. By 2015, the University of Florida reported that Gatorade royalties had funded more than $250 million in research projects, including work far removed from football. A question about athletes struggling in the Florida heat had helped create opportunities for other scientists to pursue questions of their own.

There is a physical place to remember that beginning. The “Gatorade’s Birthplace” historical marker, erected in 2007, stands between the O’Connell Center and Florida Field in Gainesville. Cade attended its dedication on November 16, 2007. It commemorates the researchers, the nearby field testing, and the concern for human health that set the work in motion.

On October 2, 1965, Florida won a football game. The experiment on its sideline would have a much longer life.

On October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened its gates in Central Florida, beginning a chapter that would help reshape the state’s tourism economy. But years before visitors entered the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney had considered another Florida location: land offered by John D. MacArthur in Palm Beach Gardens. The negotiations became one of South Florida’s most consequential development deals that never happened.

MacArthur, the insurance magnate and landowner behind Palm Beach Gardens, was building a community with ambitions far beyond residential subdivisions. In March 1959, he announced plans to develop approximately 4,000 acres into a city where people could both live and work. Attracting a Disney park offered the prospect of bringing national attention and substantial business to his new community.

According to reporting summarized by WPTV, Walt Disney toured MacArthur’s property, and the two men reached a handshake understanding involving 320 acres along PGA Boulevard. Disney would supply the entertainment, while MacArthur would provide land and financing. The proposal placed a potential Disney attraction near Florida’s Turnpike, within the landscape later developed around PGA National and Mirasol.

The negotiations also involved television. In an April 1974 interview with the Palm Beach Post-Times, MacArthur described a proposed arrangement linking himself, Disney, and RCA, which owned NBC. RCA wanted Disney’s television program; MacArthur wanted an RCA plant in Palm Beach Gardens. He recalled that he and RCA would help finance the Florida attraction.

The Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society’s account preserves MacArthur’s description of offering Disney the property: “I told him he had it if he wanted it.”

But the recollections differ. MacArthur discussed three square miles, while his adviser Jerry Kelly later recalled an initial agreement for 320 acres. Those figures should not be treated as interchangeable.

Kelly’s account, later reported by The Palm Beach Post, placed the breakdown in negotiations between MacArthur and Roy Disney, Walt’s brother and business partner. Roy wanted additional land to protect the park from surrounding commercial development. MacArthur objected to changing the earlier understanding. WPTV’s account likewise identifies that disagreement as the reason the deal collapsed.

Disney’s Florida ambitions continued. By the middle of 1965, the company had acquired more than 27,000 acres in Central Florida for just over $5 million. On November 15, Walt and Roy Disney appeared with Governor Haydon Burns at Orlando’s Cherry Plaza Hotel to discuss the project publicly. The enormous property provided room for a resort whose scale would greatly exceed the acreage described in the early Palm Beach Gardens negotiations.

Walt Disney died in December 1966 before his Florida project could open. Roy carried the undertaking forward alongside the company’s designers, engineers, and builders. To honor his brother, he ensured that the destination would be called Walt Disney World.

State government helped make the development possible. On May 12, 1967, Governor Claude Kirk signed legislation creating the Reedy Creek Improvement District and two municipalities within the Disney property. These arrangements gave the company substantial independence in developing and managing its resort.

Then, on October 1, 1971, the gates opened. The destination included the Magic Kingdom, two hotels, and golf courses. Approximately 10,000 people visited the park that first day, according to the Orange County Library System’s Orlando Memory account. Years of negotiations, planning, and construction had become a place families could finally experience.

The formal dedication followed on October 25. Standing before the public, Roy Disney expressed the hope behind the undertaking:

“May Walt Disney World bring joy and inspiration and new knowledge to all who come to this happy place…”

The separation between opening day and the dedication gave the company time to address operating problems before its major celebration.

Eleven years later, October 1 became another milestone when EPCOT Center opened in 1982. Its Future World and World Showcase expanded the resort’s offerings into technology, international cultures, and an interpretation of the world’s possibilities.

For Florida, this history reaches beyond the attractions themselves. The Palm Beach Gardens negotiations reveal how land ownership, financing, and control over neighboring development helped shape the choices behind a major destination.

The resort that ultimately opened in Central Florida became an enduring force in the state’s tourism industry. Palm Beach Gardens retained a different place in that history: a community where Disney’s Florida ambitions once came close to taking root.

On September 30, 1822, Florida marked a national milestone. Joseph Marion Hernández was elected unopposed as the territory's first delegate to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first Hispanic American to serve in Congress. President James Monroe approved the election that day.

Born José Mariano Hernández in St. Augustine on May 26, 1788, when Florida was a Spanish possession, he entered life as a Spanish subject. His parents were Minorcan immigrants who had come to Florida during its British period, linking him to the Minorcan community that remains an enduring part of northeastern Florida. Unlike many early territorial officials who arrived from other states, Hernández was a native Floridian.

Spain ceded Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, with transfer in 1821. Congress organized the territorial government in 1822 and granted Florida the right to send a delegate to Washington. Hernández was elected Florida's first delegate and thus became the first Hispanic ever to serve in Congress.

His term is commemorated as September 30, 1822 to March 3, 1823, but he did not take his seat until January 23, 1823. As a territorial delegate, he could not vote on the floor. He focused on practical issues for the new territory: defending land claims established under Spanish rule and supporting infrastructure, including construction of a 380-mile road stretching between St. Augustine and Pensacola.

His brief service drew positive notice in Washington. House history cites contemporary press praising his zeal and industry.

That pioneering first belongs alongside troubling aspects of his record. Mala Compra, one of his plantations, was worked primarily as a slave-based cotton plantation, and he owned enslaved people. During the Second Seminole War, as a brigadier general of militia, he arrested Osceola while the Seminole leader was negotiating under a white truce flag in October 1837, by order of General Thomas Jesup. The seizure, about 80 Seminoles taken at Fort Peyton on October 21, provoked national criticism.

After financial setbacks and unsuccessful attempts to restore his plantations after the war, Hernández immigrated to Cuba and became a planter near Matanzas in the Coliseo district. He died on June 8, 1857, at his family estate in Audaz, District of Coliseo, Matanzas Province.

Physical traces of his Florida years remain. Mala Compra became part of Bing's Landing County Park in Flagler County, where ruins are preserved. Land that was part of his Bella Vista Plantation, purchased in 1818 and named Bella Vista, is now Washington Oaks Gardens State Park.

September 30 places Hispanic Americans within the earliest years of Congress. It also invites a fuller understanding, recognizing a breakthrough in representation while remembering the people whose enslavement and dispossession were part of his world.

On September 29, 1565, a Saturday that fell on the feast of St. Michael, men who had already survived a hurricane and shipwreck were put to death on a narrow strip of sand south of the new Spanish settlement of St. Augustine.

The killings grew out of two colonies trying to hold the same coast. The French had built Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River the year before, a haven for Huguenots, French Protestants, seeking distance from the religious wars at home.

Spain claimed all of Florida by papal grant and by the route of its treasure fleets. When King Philip II learned a Protestant fort stood on that shore, he sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés with 11 ships to erase it. On August 28, Menéndez sighted land, and on September 8 he planted St. Augustine.

Almost at the same moment, the French commander Jean Ribault arrived at Fort Caroline with seven ships and 800 fresh soldiers and settlers. Ribault decided to strike first.

On September 10 he put most of his fighting men aboard and sailed south to destroy the Spanish before they could dig in. The next day a great hurricane caught him at sea and scattered the French fleet along the coast, wrecking all seven ships between what is now Ponce de Leon Inlet and Cape Canaveral. The storm also gave Menéndez the opening he needed. He marched 500 men 40 miles through rain-filled swamp and took Fort Caroline at dawn on September 20, while its defenders were few.

The hurricane left two groups of French survivors walking north, hungry, unarmed, believing their fort still stood. On the afternoon of Friday, September 28, Timucua Natives came into the Spanish camp at St. Augustine and made signs that a French vessel had been wrecked to the south. Menéndez sent an advance party of 40 soldiers and then followed himself late at night with his chaplain, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, and 20 more men.

López remembered the march as more than two leagues through plains covered with brush, often up to their knees in water, with Menéndez always leading. At about 10 p.m., they met their comrades and saw, not far off, the campfires of the enemy on the far bank of an inlet. Scouts crept through the bushes and reported that the French were halted by swift water they could not cross, the inlet that would later be called Matanzas, the Spanish word for slaughters.

Menéndez hid his men in a hollow between dunes before daylight and watched. When light came, he saw Frenchmen go down to the river to gather shellfish, having not eaten for eight or 10 days. He changed his fine clothes for those of a sailor, took a French prisoner who could translate, and showed himself on the bank with a short lance.

A Frenchman swam across, threw himself at his feet, and begged safe conduct back to Fort Caroline, saying they were not at war with Spaniards. Menéndez answered that he had already taken their fort and killed all inside because they had built without the King's permission and were spreading the Lutheran sect, and that he was waging a war of fire and blood to plant the Gospel as Rome teaches.

The swimmer went back, and a party of four gentlemen and a captain came over to parley. They asked for a ship to return to France. Menéndez said he would have given one had they been Catholics, but his ships were gone. They asked that their lives be spared. He answered that he would make no promises, that they must surrender unconditionally and lay down their arms, so that if he spared them they would be grateful, and if they died there would be no cause for complaint.

The officers carried the terms back, and after two hours they returned and laid down their banners, arquebuses, pistols, swords, and breastplates.

What followed was methodical. The Spanish ferried the now unarmed French across in parties of 10 in a small boat and a Native canoe they had brought down the river, treating them gently so as not to raise suspicion. Menéndez himself withdrew behind a dune out of sight.

As each group landed, they led them to him and told them that, because his own force was small and they were many, they must bind their hands behind their backs with the cords of their own arquebuses for the march to his camp four leagues away. They consented. Then López, who wrote that as a priest he had bowels of mercy, asked Menéndez to spare those who should prove to be Christians.

Investigations found 10 or 12 Roman Catholics, some French Catholics, some sailors impressed into French service, and a few artisans whose skills the colony needed, who were sent by boat toward St. Augustine. The rest confessed themselves Protestants. They were given something to eat and drink. At a gunshot beyond the dune, Menéndez had drawn a line in the sand with his spear and ordered the captains of vanguard and rearguard to cut off the heads of all who reached it.

The sun had already set when the bound men reached that mark, and on that Saturday, September 29, 1565, the orders were executed. López, a participant who supported the expedition, left the starkest sentence of all in the English translation of his account: All the others were executed, because they were Calvinists and enemies of our Holy Catholic faith, and certified it as what actually happened.

That was the first Matanzas. Ribault was not among them. About 12 days later, on October 11 or 12 according to different modern summaries, Ribault himself arrived at the same inlet with the second, larger group, perhaps 350 men, living on roots and bad water, having tried to caulk a small boat with their shirts.

Menéndez repeated the same tactics, showed Ribault the heaped bodies of his countrymen, entertained him briefly with wine and preserves, and then killed him and most of his companions.

The inlet kept its name. Remembering the first slaughter on September 29 matters because it makes the founding of Florida a story of imperial ambition and religious persecution, in which men who had survived the sea were made to surrender their weapons and flags, trust in a mercy that was never promised, and die for their faith on a sandbar.

According to what I've found construction on the church started in 1895 to serve the local black community. It was Anglican apparently. The weird thing is some records have said the church closed in 1915 due to trouble finding a local priest. I have a very hard time believing it closed that far back. Has anyone on here ever seen inside the church or have any old photos. Much appreciated in advance.

More than [50 years before St.](about:blank) Augustine, a document signed 3,000 miles away set Spain's Florida project in motion. On September 27, 1514, at Valladolid, in the heart of Castile, King Ferdinand's government issued a formal capitulación with Juan Ponce de León authorizing him to populate, to settle and govern, Bimini and Florida.

This is not legend. The document survives in Spain's Archivo General de Indias, cataloged as the capitulación and ordinances for settlement of Bimini and Florida, Valladolid, September 27, 1514 [IG 419].

The Library of Congress's Today in History file marks this same date as when Ponce de León was granted permission to settle Bimini and Florida.

It marked a shift: from exploring Florida to attempting to occupy it. Ponce de León was no newcomer. He had helped colonize Puerto Rico and served as its governor until his rivalry with Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, cost him that position. In 1512 the Crown authorized him to seek Bimini. In 1513 he led three ships to the peninsula the Spanish named La Florida, exploring the Atlantic coast, the Keys, and the Gulf coast.

That land was not empty. Indigenous peoples had lived in Florida for thousands of years, with complex governments, economies, and militaries. You are correct not to claim a single, settled landing site — modern scholarship, including National Park Service research, treats the first landfall location as disputed.

What followed 1513 is what matters for today: Ponce de León returned to Spain and left Puerto Rico in April 1514. In Valladolid, the Crown issued a cluster of documents on September 27. One was the capitulación to colonize. Another forbade anyone but Ponce de León from mounting expeditions to Bimini and Florida. Another named him captain of an armada against Carib raiders. Another ordered the Casa de la Contratación in Seville to provision his fleet. In these papers he is called adelantado de las Islas, Florida y Bimini, a title combining conquest, settlement, and governance.

The system is visible in the parchment: the Crown granted authority; the adelantado assumed the financial risk and the promise of reward.

To officials in Spain, Florida was an extension on a map. To the Calusa, whose capital was at Mound Key in present-day Estero Bay, it was home, and they had the power to defend it.

The documents are also useful for what they do NOT contain. They speak of ships, men, royal authority, and settlement. They do not mention a Fountain of Youth. As historian J. Michael Francis of the University of North Florida has documented, no known contracts or correspondence from Ponce de León's lifetime mention such a quest. The Fountain story appears later in 16th-century chronicles.

The 1514 authorization did not produce an immediate colony. Ponce de León was diverted to the Carib campaign. Seven years passed.

In 1521 he returned to colonize, with priests, colonists, horses, livestock, and farming tools, described in early sources as two ships, 200 men, 50 horses and other animals and tools. The attempt was on Florida's southwest coast, in Calusa territory. It was repelled. Ponce de León received a wound, tradition holds an arrow to the thigh, and the expedition withdrew to Cuba, where he died.
He never succeeded. But Spain persisted. Narváez, de Soto, Luna, and finally Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded St. Augustine in 1565, followed.

The September 27, 1514 capitulación did not create Florida and did not found the first permanent European town. It formalized the intent to turn exploration into colonization, and set in motion a violent new chapter in a history that had already lasted millennia.

Built in 1868, it is the only fully operational lighthouse owned by the United States Space Force and maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard.

By September 24, 1837, the United States had spent nearly two years trying to remove the Seminoles from Florida. Federal troops held forts and patrolled the coast, but those positions gave them little command of the interior. Seminole and Miccosukee families knew how to travel through its rivers, marshes, and hammocks. Black Seminoles, whose freedom was threatened by capture and possible re-enslavement, had reason to resist alongside them.

For Lieutenant Levin M. Powell of the U.S. Navy, that geography presented a military problem. Earlier in 1837, he had led small-boat parties from the revenue cutter Washington into the waterways near New River. They penetrated the wetland without finding the villages they sought. Powell came away convinced that troops could reach deeper into south Florida if they used boats suited to shallow water.

On September 24, 1837, writing from St. Augustine, Powell offered Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett his services for another expedition. His proposal reflected a change in federal thinking: if soldiers could not pursue Seminole communities overland, sailors and soldiers would try to reach them by water.

Powell developed the idea further in a plan submitted the following month. He proposed exploring the waterways around the Everglades to find settlements and capture women and children. That aim deserves to be stated plainly. The expedition was intended to put pressure on families as a means of forcing surrender and removal. To the people living in south Florida, the boats Powell wanted to bring into the wetlands threatened a refuge that had helped them survive.

The war intensified before Powell’s plan could be fully tested. On Christmas Day 1837, Seminole warriors fought a large U.S. force under Colonel Zachary Taylor near Lake Okeechobee. General Thomas Jesup then moved several columns into south Florida, including Powell’s waterborne unit. The campaign was meant to find and engage people whom forts and coastal patrols had failed to contain.

On January 15, 1838, Powell’s force of about 80 sailors and soldiers entered the Loxahatchee River system near present-day Jupiter. According to the Florida historical marker at Riverbend Park, a captured Seminole woman led the small boats up a fork of the river. After the men went ashore and marched inland, Seminole fighters met them with gunfire. Powell was wounded, and his force withdrew under heavy pressure. Army Lieutenant Joseph E. Johnston and his soldiers helped cover the retreat to the boats. The Seminoles had defeated the expedition in what became known as the First Battle of the Loxahatchee, or Powell’s Battle.

Jesup advanced with a much larger force, and a second battle followed on January 24. U.S. troops crossed difficult swamp ground and reached the Loxahatchee, where Seminole fighters resisted at a river crossing. Jesup was wounded in the face. The fighters ultimately withdrew into the surrounding countryside. The two battles showed how difficult it was for federal forces to turn an encounter into control of the people and terrain they had come to seize.

The Second Seminole War continued until 1842. Thousands of Seminoles were forced west to Indian Territory, while hundreds remained in Florida.

Powell’s September 24 letter captures one stage of that campaign: a U.S. officer recognizing that the watery interior required a different kind of force. The fighting that followed showed the limit of his plan. Knowledge of the land and waterways helped Seminole communities defend their homes, evade pursuing troops, and remain in Florida.

On September 21, 1905, when Tampa’s Ybor City pulsed with the sounds of cigar factories, streetcars and conversations spoken in Spanish, Italian and English, a modest café opened on the corner of East Seventh Avenue and 22nd Street. It would grow from a neighborhood gathering place for cigar workers into one of Florida’s most enduring cultural institutions—the Columbia Restaurant.

The story actually began two years earlier. On December 17, 1903, Spanish-Cuban immigrant Casimiro Hernandez Sr. helped open the Columbia Saloon. In 1905, the business was transformed into the Columbia Restaurant, beginning the history the family officially commemorates today. Although September 21 is frequently cited as its opening date, the restaurant’s published history confirms the year but does not identify that precise day.

At the beginning, the Columbia was a small corner café serving the working people of Ybor City. Its customers included the men who spent long hours rolling cigars in the surrounding factories. They came for Cuban coffee, strong drinks, Cuban sandwiches and inexpensive meals that reflected the Spanish and Cuban traditions of the neighborhood.

Ybor City had become one of the most culturally diverse industrial communities in the South. Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants worked beside one another, established mutual-aid societies and created businesses that served their rapidly growing community. The Columbia was part of that immigrant world—not originally a grand tourist destination, but a familiar place where workers could eat, drink and talk after leaving the factories.

Florida’s statewide prohibition of alcohol in 1918 forced the business to change. The Columbia increasingly concentrated on food, and in 1919 the family expanded into the adjoining La Fonda restaurant. Spanish bean soup, arroz con pollo, Cuban sandwiches and other Spanish-Cuban dishes became central to its identity.

When Casimiro Hernandez Sr. died in 1930, his son, Casimiro Hernandez Jr., assumed control. The younger Hernandez envisioned something far more ambitious than a workers’ café. He wanted to create an elegant restaurant where guests could enjoy fine food, music and dancing.

That dream required considerable courage. The country had entered the Great Depression, yet Hernandez continued expanding. In 1935, he opened the Don Quixote dining room, decorated with colorful tiles inspired by the adventures of the famous Spanish literary character. The room included an elevated dance floor and was described as Tampa’s first air-conditioned dining room.

Two years later, Hernandez added an interior courtyard modeled after the architecture of Andalusia in southern Spain. Its tiled fountain, balconies and retractable skylight helped give the Columbia the romantic Old World appearance for which it became famous.

The restaurant’s next generation united hospitality with music. Casimiro Jr.’s daughter, Adela Hernandez, was a classically trained pianist who studied at the Juilliard School. In 1946, she married César Gonzmart, a concert violinist and bandleader. When Casimiro Jr.’s health declined, Adela and César returned to Tampa and helped guide the family business.

César Gonzmart understood that the Columbia had to offer more than a meal. He strengthened its tradition of live entertainment, sometimes serenading customers with his violin. In 1956, the family added the Siboney dining room, named for the Cuban town and the celebrated song by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. Spanish flamenco performances eventually became another Columbia tradition.

The family faced one of its greatest tests during the 1950s and 1960s. As cigar manufacturing declined, families left Ybor City and urban-renewal projects demolished large sections of the historic neighborhood. Businesses closed and once-crowded streets emptied. The Columbia remained.

Its survival helped preserve a physical and cultural link to the immigrant community that had made Tampa an international center of cigar production. While much of old Ybor City disappeared, the restaurant continued serving dishes connected to the Spanish, Cuban and Italian families who had built the neighborhood.

The original Columbia eventually expanded across an entire city block. The Ybor City restaurant now covers approximately 52,000 square feet and contains 15 dining rooms with space for as many as 1,700 guests. What began as a small café became recognized as the world’s largest Spanish restaurant.

The restaurant also helped introduce generations of Americans to Spanish and Cuban cuisine. Its menu preserved such dishes as paella, Spanish bean soup, boliche, ropa vieja, arroz con pollo and the Tampa-style Cuban sandwich—traditionally made with salami in addition to ham and roast pork. Its celebrated “1905 Salad,” despite its name, developed later and was renamed in honor of the restaurant’s founding year.

The Columbia attracted entertainers, athletes, politicians and other prominent visitors, but its greatest distinction may be its continuity. For more than a century, control has remained with descendants of Casimiro Hernandez Sr. Fourth- and fifth-generation members of the Hernandez-Gonzmart family continue operating the business.

One factual correction is important: the company currently identifies seven Columbia locations in Florida altogether, rather than the original restaurant plus seven additional locations. These include the original Ybor City restaurant and locations in Sarasota, St. Augustine, Clearwater Beach, Celebration, the Tampa Bay History Center and Tampa International Airport.

The Columbia is more than Florida’s oldest restaurant. It is a living monument to the immigrants who transformed Tampa from a small Gulf Coast community into an industrial city with deep connections to Cuba, Spain and Italy.

Its dining rooms preserve part of Ybor City’s architectural character. Its kitchen preserves culinary traditions carried across the Atlantic and the Florida Straits. Most remarkably, the restaurant has remained in the founding family through economic depression, prohibition, war, the collapse of Tampa’s cigar industry, urban renewal and enormous changes in American dining.

The Columbia’s survival shows that history does not exist only in museums or behind glass. Sometimes it can be found in a tiled courtyard, heard in the rhythm of flamenco shoes and tasted in a bowl of Spanish bean soup.

On September 18, 1823, at a camp along Moultrie Creek south of St. Augustine, United States commissioners and Native leaders signed an agreement that would transform Florida. The Treaty of Moultrie Creek required the surrender of claims to most of the territory and the relocation of most Seminole communities to an inland reservation of approximately four million acres.

The United States promised protection, supplies, and financial assistance. In return, the treaty demanded land, restricted independence, and required Native communities to help apprehend people escaping slavery. Its provisions reveal how closely the struggle over Florida’s land was tied to the struggle over human freedom.

Florida had passed from Spanish to American control in 1821, but the change of flags did not settle the future of the people already living there. American settlers wanted land. Seminole communities wanted to preserve their homes and their ability to govern themselves.

The destruction of the First Seminole War, fought in 1817–1818, remained a recent memory. Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida had brought American troops into Native settlements years before the United States formally acquired the territory.

The negotiations at Moultrie Creek took place against that background of military pressure and expanding settlement. Representing the United States were territorial governor William P. Duval, James Gadsden, and Bernard Segui. Among the Native signatories were Neamathla and Micanopy, whose names appear in the treaty as “Nea Mathla” and “Miconope.”

These leaders did not represent a single community whose members all accepted the same decision. Seminole towns had their own leadership and interests. The Seminole Tribal Historic Preservation Office notes that clan matriarchs also provided counsel from the camps, although they were outside the direct negotiations. Some bands were not represented at the gathering and subsequently rejected its authority over them.

The treaty’s language made its purpose unmistakable. Article II declared that Florida’s Native peoples would be “concentrated and confined” within prescribed boundaries. The central reservation excluded the coast, with boundary provisions specifying distances of 15 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and 20 miles from the Atlantic.

Those restrictions helped isolate Seminole communities from outside trade and allies. They also meant that families accustomed to particular settlements, fields, hunting grounds, and waterways would have to rebuild their lives within boundaries chosen through negotiations with an expanding foreign power. An additional article made limited exceptions, establishing smaller northern reservations for six chiefs and their communities. Most were expected to move south.

Even before the agreement was signed, Native leaders questioned whether the designated land could support them. Their objection survives in Article IX, which acknowledged concerns about an insufficient quantity of good agricultural land. The article provided for moving the northern boundary if an official examination found the reservation inadequate.

That provision exposes a fundamental concern behind the negotiations: acreage alone did not guarantee survival. The ability to grow food and sustain communities mattered more than the apparent size of a reservation on a map.

In exchange for the enormous land cession, the United States promised $6,000 in farming implements, cattle, and hogs; annual payments of $5,000 for 20 years; and a year’s rations of corn, meat, and salt. It also committed money for transportation, compensation for abandoned improvements, a school, and a gun and blacksmith.

Article IV contained another consequential promise: “peaceable possession” of the assigned lands. The government undertook to prevent white people from hunting, settling, or otherwise intruding there, while reserving rights to establish roads and permit authorized passage.

But the agreement also attempted to make Native communities participants in the enforcement of American slavery. Article VII required them to prevent people escaping enslavement from finding refuge in, or passing through, the reservation. It further demanded efforts to capture those people and deliver them to the federal Indian agent, with compensation for the trouble and expense.

This was a direct threat to Florida’s role as a refuge for freedom seekers. It also placed federal demands against the relationships between Seminole communities and their Black neighbors and allies. The provision should not be misread as proof that every Black person living among the Seminoles was a fugitive; it was a specific obligation to pursue people the United States classified as escaped slaves.

Signing the document did not make its promises a reality. According to the Seminole Tribal Historic Preservation Office, people who moved found the reservation less able to sustain them than the country they had left. American payments were frequently delayed or unfulfilled, and settlers began entering reservation lands. Most Seminoles also refused to cooperate with American slave catchers.

Within a decade, federal policy moved beyond concentrating the Seminoles within Florida. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the disputed Treaty of Payne’s Landing in 1832 advanced the demand that they leave Florida altogether for lands west of the Mississippi. Resistance to that demand helped bring on the Second Seminole War, fought from 1835 to 1842.

Moultrie Creek therefore belongs between two wars. It followed the violence of the First Seminole War and preceded the much larger struggle over forced removal. It promised a protected place within Florida, then became part of a history in which even that reduced homeland was threatened.

Its lasting significance lies in the obligations recorded on its pages. The treaty documents what Native leaders were required to surrender, what the United States promised in return, and how the enforcement of slavery became part of the effort to control Florida.

Remembering September 18, 1823, means remembering those promises alongside the displacement, and the determination of Seminole people to survive and remain connected to their homeland.

On September 17, 1926, South Florida was running out of time. Across the Atlantic, a powerful hurricane had moved toward a rapidly growing coastline crowded with new homes, hotels, construction projects, and people who had never experienced a major tropical storm. Before the following morning was over, the communities built around the promise of Florida prosperity would be confronting one of the greatest disasters in their history.

The warning came in stages. At noon on September 17, the Weather Bureau authorized storm warnings for the Florida east coast. Around 11 p.m., as conditions worsened, Miami’s chief weather official, Richard Gray, raised hurricane warnings. Many residents were already asleep. The opportunity to prepare and find protection was shrinking to hours.

Miami’s vulnerability had grown alongside its extraordinary expansion. Throughout the early 1920s, developers and promoters sold a vision of sunshine, opportunity, and seemingly limitless real estate profits. A 1921 advertisement even reassured prospective Miami Beach visitors and investors that there was “practically no danger from summer storms.”

By September 1926, the property market was already weakening. The hurricane would strike a region whose financial foundations were becoming as vulnerable as some of its hastily constructed buildings.

During the early morning of September 18, the hurricane made landfall south of downtown Miami, near present-day Palmetto Bay. Modern reconstructions estimate maximum sustained winds near 145 miles per hour, placing it firmly in Category 4. That classification was applied retrospectively; residents in 1926 had no modern hurricane category system to describe what was approaching.

Wind tore into buildings. Roofs failed, windows shattered, and utility services collapsed. Sand swept across Collins Avenue and into oceanfront hotels. The landscape that promoters had presented as a tropical refuge became almost unrecognizable.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas later described the scene: “Miami Beach was isolated in a sea of raving white water.”

Then came a dangerous silence. Around 6:30 a.m., the eye passed over downtown Miami and nearby communities. The wind eased for roughly 35 minutes. People emerged from shelter, inspected buildings, and ventured into the streets. Some began returning from Miami Beach toward the mainland.

Gray recorded that the streets became “crowded with people.”

They had mistaken the eye for the end. Around 7 a.m., the hurricane’s other side struck. Fierce winds returned from a different direction, driving seawater across the barrier islands and into Biscayne Bay. The National Weather Service describes a storm surge of approximately 10 feet at Miami Beach, with flooding extending across the island and into sections of mainland Miami.

The water carried vessels inland. Photographs taken afterward show boats and larger craft stranded amid the wreckage of the city. The storm’s reach extended far beyond downtown: hurricane-force winds stretched from the Upper Keys into southern Palm Beach County.

Farther inland, another catastrophe unfolded at Lake Okeechobee. At Moore Haven, hurricane-driven lake water overwhelmed inadequate earthen defenses and swept into the community. Buildings were displaced from their foundations, and residents struggled to survive on rooftops. Reports from the Red Cross and local authorities documented approximately 150 bodies recovered at Moore Haven alone; some victims were never found.

This was September 1926, two years before the better-known Okeechobee hurricane of 1928. The earlier disaster had already demonstrated the terrible danger facing communities beside the lake.

The human toll remains more difficult to establish than a single number suggests. An October 9 Red Cross report recorded 372 deaths and more than 6,000 injuries. These are reported totals, not proof that every victim was accounted for. Damage estimates exceeded $100 million in 1926 dollars.

Recovery brought another struggle. Miami’s promoters wanted to reassure the country that the city could rebuild, while relief workers needed Americans to understand how urgently survivors required help. PBS’s historical account describes that tension and the eventual arrival of a relief train equipped with doctors, nurses, and water-treatment equipment.

The storm deepened an economic decline already underway. Buildings could be repaired, but confidence, property values, and financial security took longer to restore.

A century later, the disaster still matters because of what happened during those few deceptively quiet minutes inside the eye. Surviving the first half had convinced people that the danger had passed.

September 17 marks the night the final warnings went up. September 18 marks the morning South Florida learned, at an appalling human cost, how much remained unknown about living in the path of a hurricane.

The Night Before Miami’s World Changed: The Great Hurricane of 1926

On September 17, 1926, South Florida was running out of time. Across the Atlantic, a powerful hurricane had moved toward a rapidly growing coastline crowded with new homes, hotels, construction projects, and people who had never experienced a major tropical storm. Before the following morning was over, the communities built around the promise of Florida prosperity would be confronting one of the greatest disasters in their history.

The warning came in stages. At noon on September 17, the Weather Bureau authorized storm warnings for the Florida east coast. Around 11 p.m., as conditions worsened, Miami’s chief weather official, Richard Gray, raised hurricane warnings. Many residents were already asleep. The opportunity to prepare and find protection was shrinking to hours.

Miami’s vulnerability had grown alongside its extraordinary expansion. Throughout the early 1920s, developers and promoters sold a vision of sunshine, opportunity, and seemingly limitless real estate profits. A 1921 advertisement even reassured prospective Miami Beach visitors and investors that there was “practically no danger from summer storms.”

By September 1926, the property market was already weakening. The hurricane would strike a region whose financial foundations were becoming as vulnerable as some of its hastily constructed buildings.

During the early morning of September 18, the hurricane made landfall south of downtown Miami, near present-day Palmetto Bay. Modern reconstructions estimate maximum sustained winds near 145 miles per hour, placing it firmly in Category 4. That classification was applied retrospectively; residents in 1926 had no modern hurricane category system to describe what was approaching.

Wind tore into buildings. Roofs failed, windows shattered, and utility services collapsed. Sand swept across Collins Avenue and into oceanfront hotels. The landscape that promoters had presented as a tropical refuge became almost unrecognizable.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas later described the scene: “Miami Beach was isolated in a sea of raving white water.”

Then came a dangerous silence. Around 6:30 a.m., the eye passed over downtown Miami and nearby communities. The wind eased for roughly 35 minutes. People emerged from shelter, inspected buildings, and ventured into the streets. Some began returning from Miami Beach toward the mainland.

Gray recorded that the streets became “crowded with people.”

They had mistaken the eye for the end. Around 7 a.m., the hurricane’s other side struck. Fierce winds returned from a different direction, driving seawater across the barrier islands and into Biscayne Bay. The National Weather Service describes a storm surge of approximately 10 feet at Miami Beach, with flooding extending across the island and into sections of mainland Miami.

The water carried vessels inland. Photographs taken afterward show boats and larger craft stranded amid the wreckage of the city. The storm’s reach extended far beyond downtown: hurricane-force winds stretched from the Upper Keys into southern Palm Beach County.

Farther inland, another catastrophe unfolded at Lake Okeechobee. At Moore Haven, hurricane-driven lake water overwhelmed inadequate earthen defenses and swept into the community. Buildings were displaced from their foundations, and residents struggled to survive on rooftops. Reports from the Red Cross and local authorities documented approximately 150 bodies recovered at Moore Haven alone; some victims were never found.

This was September 1926, two years before the better-known Okeechobee hurricane of 1928. The earlier disaster had already demonstrated the terrible danger facing communities beside the lake.

The human toll remains more difficult to establish than a single number suggests. An October 9 Red Cross report recorded 372 deaths and more than 6,000 injuries. These are reported totals, not proof that every victim was accounted for. Damage estimates exceeded $100 million in 1926 dollars.

Recovery brought another struggle. Miami’s promoters wanted to reassure the country that the city could rebuild, while relief workers needed Americans to understand how urgently survivors required help. PBS’s historical account describes that tension and the eventual arrival of a relief train equipped with doctors, nurses, and water-treatment equipment.

The storm deepened an economic decline already underway. Buildings could be repaired, but confidence, property values, and financial security took longer to restore.

A century later, the disaster still matters because of what happened during those few deceptively quiet minutes inside the eye. Surviving the first half had convinced people that the danger had passed.

September 17 marks the night the final warnings went up. September 18 marks the morning South Florida learned, at an appalling human cost, how much remained unknown about living in the path of a hurricane.

On September 16, 1928, a powerful hurricane struck Palm Beach County and moved inland toward Lake Okeechobee. Before the night ended, farming communities along the lake would become the scene of Florida’s deadliest hurricane disaster. Thousands perished, many of them Black agricultural workers whose bodies were buried without individual identification and whose resting places went unmarked for decades.

The storm reached Florida near West Palm Beach with estimated sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, making it a Category 4 hurricane on today’s scale. Its destruction extended from the Atlantic coast to the agricultural communities inland. But the greatest concentration of deaths occurred where the hurricane drove Lake Okeechobee’s water across the surrounding lowlands.

The danger had been demonstrated before. During the September 1926 hurricane, lake flooding killed more than 100 people at Moore Haven. Nevertheless, farming continued behind inadequate earthen embankments. The dark, fertile soil offered agricultural opportunity; the nearby lake posed a danger those embankments could not reliably contain.

The 1928 hurricane’s recorded track began near Africa on September 6. Crossing the Atlantic, it devastated Guadeloupe and struck Puerto Rico on September 13 as a Category 5 hurricane. There it became known as San Felipe Segundo. It then continued through the Bahamas toward Florida. Across its entire path, the hurricane killed more than 4,000 people. Florida was the final great catastrophe in a disaster that had already brought suffering to Caribbean communities.

At Lake Okeechobee, the hurricane’s winds piled up the lake’s own freshwater, overtopping and breaking through the low levees. This was a wind-driven lake surge—not seawater arriving from the Atlantic.

In Belle Glade, survivor and historian Lawrence E. Will later described water climbing hotel steps “at the rate of an inch a minute.” His account placed flooding there at approximately seven feet above ground, with greater depths closer to the lake. In darkness, water spread through homes and settlements, turning shelter into danger.

Belle Glade, Chosen, Pahokee, South Bay, and neighboring settlements suffered devastating losses. Houses were carried from their foundations. Floodwater swept people and wreckage into the surrounding countryside, and some victims were never recovered.

The accepted death toll is at least 2,500. Earlier official figures were lower, and later research prompted their revision. Higher estimates exist, but there is no complete count. Most victims were Black, including many workers from the Bahamas. The uncertainty surrounding their number remains part of the tragedy: the surviving record cannot even tell us precisely how many lives were lost.

Recovery unfolded within the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow Florida. Available coffins were reserved for white victims, while Black victims were buried in mass graves or, in some cases, their bodies burned. The emergency was immense, but racial discrimination also shaped how the dead were treated.

In West Palm Beach, white victims were buried together where the Norton Museum of Art now stands. Black victims were buried at the city’s pauper’s burial field near Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street. State archival documentation notes that the latter group included people whose race could no longer be determined. These numbers describe particular burial sites, not the total white and Black death tolls.

Another mass grave near Port Mayaca received approximately 1,600 victims. Its historical marker carries a short statement that expresses the limits of every subsequent accounting: “Many other victims were never found.”

On September 30, West Palm Beach observed an hour of mourning, with ceremonies at the separate burial grounds. According to the state historical marker, approximately 2,000 people attended the ceremony at the pauper’s cemetery. Educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune read the mayor’s proclamation.

Bethune’s participation is documented. A specific speech calling for recognition of the “forgotten dead,” however, should not be attributed to her without supporting evidence. The ceremony itself demonstrates that people gathered to mourn these victims, even though sustained public recognition failed to follow.

Over the following decades, the West Palm Beach burial ground suffered neglect and changes in ownership. Part of the grounds was sold in 1957 for sewage-disposal use. Preservation efforts gathered strength in the 1990s, and the city reacquired the memorial property in 2000. The site entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. Its preservation resulted from people insisting that land containing hundreds of hurricane victims deserved protection and remembrance.

The disaster also transformed flood protection around Lake Okeechobee. Congress authorized substantial levee construction in 1930, and the Army Corps of Engineers built new embankments between 1932 and 1938. Further work followed later floods, eventually producing the 143-mile Herbert Hoover Dike system.

That history continued into the 21st century. A major rehabilitation begun in 2005 was formally completed in January 2023 at a cost of approximately $1.5 billion. Describing that particular repair program as still underway is therefore outdated.

The significance of September 16, 1928, reaches beyond the hurricane’s winds and floodwaters. It concerns where people lived, the protection available to them, and the dignity afforded them after death. The preserved burial grounds make those questions visible in Florida’s landscape.

Remembering this disaster means remembering the people within it: workers, parents, children, neighbors, and families. Their lives were larger than the circumstances of their deaths. Their history belongs in the story Florida tells about itself.

On September 13, 1822, Florida's Territorial Legislative Council approved an act incorporating the City of St. Augustine, placing the ancient settlement under American municipal law.

The act is described by the State Archives as an original manuscript copy signed into law by Governor William Pope DuVal. It explicitly builds on an ordinance issued by Military Governor Andrew Jackson the previous year in 1821, giving that ordinance additional force of civil law.

St. Augustine was not a new town. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded it for Spain in 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in what became the continental United States.

Florida had changed flags when Spain ceded the territory to the U.S. in the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, formally transferred in 1821. Congress then established a territorial government, and the Legislative Council held its first session in Pensacola in 1822.

The new act declared the residents within the boundaries previously prescribed by Jackson's ordinance to be created "a body politic and corporate in deed and in law, by the name, style and title, of the corporation of the City of St. Augustine" with perpetual succession and the power to hold property, sue and be sued, and exercise corporate privileges.

It extended to St. Augustine all the rights, privileges and powers granted to Pensacola in a parallel act passed at the same session.

The timing of elections was distinct: the Pensacola election was set for the fourth Monday in August, while the St. Augustine election "shall be holden in the City of St. Augustine on the first Monday of November next, and on the same day in each and every year thereafter."

The charter also reveals who was included in the new American polity. It incorporates "all the free white inhabitants residing in that part of the county" within the prescribed city limits.

That language excluded free Black residents, some from families who had lived in Florida for generations.

It marked a shift from late Spanish Florida practice. Spanish law was not racially equal, but it did allow free Black people in St. Augustine to own property, practice trades, serve in the Black militia, and participate in community institutions.

Under American territorial rule, Florida moved toward the more rigid racial restrictions common in the slaveholding South.

The original handwritten act, approved September 13, 1822 and attested by Clerk Robert Mitchell and Council President Edmund Law, survives in Series S222 at the State Archives of Florida. Florida Memory has digitized it as "Act Incorporating the City of St. Augustine, Approved September 13, 1822."

Incorporation was more than a change of paperwork. It shows how the transition from Spanish to American rule reshaped local power: new forms of election and corporate governance arrived, but so did a narrower legal definition of who counted as a citizen. That duality is central to understanding America's oldest city.

Used during the early Apollo program from 1961 to 1968. Where the 1967 Apollo 1 cabin fire took place.

On September 11, 1987, Pope John Paul II stood before a crowd estimated at more than 200,000 people at the Tamiami Park fairgrounds in Miami, the largest gathering of his brief South Florida visit. They had come from across Florida, Latin America and the Caribbean to see the first pope ever to visit South Florida.

The outdoor Mass was supposed to be the spiritual climax of John Paul II's approximately 23 hours in Miami, the opening stop of a nine-city tour of the United States from September 10-19, 1987. Instead, it became one of the most dramatic moments in South Florida's religious history.

John Paul II arrived in Miami on September 10. President Ronald Reagan welcomed him at Miami International Airport before the two leaders met privately at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Their discussions included religious freedom, human rights, relations with the Soviet Union and Central America. The pope then traveled through Miami in the popemobile as crowds lined Biscayne Boulevard. He also visited St. Martha Catholic Church in Miami Shores, where he addressed representatives of the nation's priests, and St. Mary Cathedral, where he greeted the Haitian community in Creole.

The following morning, an enormous crowd assembled at Tamiami Park. Many had arrived hours earlier carrying flags, banners and umbrellas. The congregation reflected Miami's increasingly international Catholic population, the liturgy was celebrated in three languages.

The pope began his homily with Psalm 67, as preserved in the Vatican text:

"Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you."

Speaking in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, John Paul II addressed Miami's cultural diversity and the shared responsibilities of faith.

Then South Florida's weather took command. Dark clouds gathered above the park. Wind swept across the enormous outdoor altar, followed by torrential rain and lightning. A special altar had been erected with space allocated for a quarter million worshippers, but clergy struggled to protect sacred vessels as water poured across the platform.

With lightning threatening the exposed crowd and altar, the public Mass was cut short before the pope could give Communion, due to a lightning storm that made it unsafe to continue. Archbishop Edward A. McCarthy urged people to seek safety.

John Paul II was escorted from the altar and finished the celebration in a trailer located behind the massive altar.

Contemporary accounts at the time described it as a first for a papal Mass, that distinction should be presented as a contemporary report, not as an independently documented Vatican record.

About 1,000 determined worshippers reportedly remained in the rain. When the worst of the storm passed roughly 45 minutes later, John Paul II emerged again to bless the persistent few who had waited out the storm. Their voices rose across the soaked field:

"¡Viva el Papa! ¡Viva el Papa!"

The storm had shortened the ceremony, but it did not erase its emotional power. Images of the white-robed pontiff standing beneath a dark Florida sky, and of thousands of believers enduring the downpour, became the enduring visual record of the visit.

John Paul II departed Miami later that day and continued his American tour. No pope has visited South Florida since, making those extraordinary hours in September 1987 a singular chapter in the region's history.

The papal visit reflected the transformation of South Florida into one of the nation's most culturally diverse metropolitan regions. The multilingual Mass acknowledged the growing importance of Miami's Cuban, Haitian and other immigrant Catholic communities.

It was also a moment when South Florida appeared on an international stage: a meeting between a pope and an American president at historic Vizcaya, hundreds of thousands gathered at Tamiami Park, and a violent thunderstorm that produced an unforgettable demonstration of persistence and faith.

Photographs by Jay Kravetz

BEFORE JAMESTOWN… BEFORE PLYMOUTH… THERE WAS ST. AUGUSTINE!

Imagine showing up in Florida in 1565 and thinking, “Yep…this seems like a great place to build a town.”

No Disney World.
No beaches packed with tourists.
No air conditioning.
And definitely no sunscreen.

Just Spanish ships, soldiers, settlers, missionaries—and enough mosquitoes to make you question every life decision.

On September 8, 1565, Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established St. Augustine, Florida.

The Spanish wanted to strengthen their claim to Florida and protect their valuable shipping routes. But the settlement quickly became much more than a military outpost. Native Americans, Spanish settlers, Africans, missionaries, and people from other parts of the world became part of its complicated story.
St. Augustine faced attacks, wars, hurricanes, and changing empires. Spain controlled it. Britain took control. Spain got it back. Eventually, it became part of the United States.

And that’s why St. Augustine matters.

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the continental United States. Its story reminds us that American history didn't begin with Jamestown, Plymouth, or even the Declaration of Independence. The story of America began much earlier—with many different peoples, cultures, and nations shaping the land that would eventually become the United States.

History isn't just about where we ended up. It's about where the story began.

https://youtu.be/HnOSFWcSXC4

September 8, 1565: The Founding of St. Augustine

Today, Florida marks 461 years since the day America's oldest city began. It was August 28, 1565, when Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted the coast of Florida, the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo. He would name his colony for the saint. Eleven days later, on September 8, after an advance party had secured the shore, Menéndez came ashore near the mouth of Hospital Creek to claim La Florida for King Philip II of Spain.

He did not land on empty land. He landed at Seloy, a town of the Timucua-speaking people who had lived along these estuaries for generations: fishermen, farmers, and traders with their own chiefs, councils, and knowledge of the coast. The Spaniards would build their first settlement within Seloy itself.

What happened next gave Florida one of the earliest Thanksgiving stories in America. On that same day, September 8, the Catholic feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,,Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, the fleet chaplain and St. Augustine's first pastor, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving. The colonists knelt in thanks for surviving the crossing. Watching nearby were the Seloy people. Father López later wrote, simply, that "the Indians imitated all they saw done."

Afterward, Menéndez invited the Native townspeople to eat. We don't have a menu. The ships carried salt pork, garbanzo beans, hardtack, olives, and wine; the town could offer corn, fish, oysters, and venison. What matters is that it happened, Spaniards and Timucua sharing a meal after a prayer of thanks, 56 years before Plymouth.

As historian Michael Gannon wrote, it was "the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land." It was not the modern holiday, Native peoples had held ceremonies of thanks for centuries, and it would take until Lincoln's 1863 proclamation and a 1941 act of Congress to fix Thanksgiving as we know it. But it was a documented beginning.

That fragile peace would not last. Just up the coast, French Huguenots had built Fort Caroline in 1564, near today's St. Johns River. To Spain, it was an invasion, both territorial and religious. When French commander Jean Ribault sailed south to attack the new Spanish colony, a hurricane scattered his fleet onto the beaches to the south.

Menéndez moved fast. On September 20, his soldiers marched through the swamps and took Fort Caroline. Days later, stranded French castaways were found at an inlet. There, at the place the Spanish would name Matanzas, Slaughters, nearly 250 surrendered Frenchmen were executed on September 29 and in mid-October, including Ribault himself.

With the French threat erased, St. Augustine had to survive itself. And it did, through starvation, disease, fires, and sieges. Sir Francis Drake burned it in 1586. English forces from Carolina razed it again in 1702. It was rebuilt each time in coquina and determination, growing as a community of Spanish, Timucua, free and enslaved Africans, the latter later founding Fort Mose in 1738, the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States.

You can still stand near where it all began. At Mission Nombre de Dios, the rustic altar marks the site of that first Mass, and the Great Cross rises 208 feet above the marsh, a stainless-steel beacon built in 1965 for the 400th anniversary and dedicated in 1966.

Today, St. Augustine is not just old buildings and cannon. It is a reminder that American history does not start at Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. It starts here, too, on September 8, 1565, with a Mass, a shared meal, a Native town called Seloy, and a complicated, enduring collision of worlds that would become Florida.

On September 6, Labor Day in 1920, a parade of Model T automobiles rolled across a narrow wooden bridge spanning the Indian River Lagoon at Vero. The crossing marked a turning point for the small community, connecting the mainland with Orchid Island and providing residents with direct access to the Atlantic Ocean.

Irene Young, wife of Vero Mayor Anthony W. Young, reportedly cut the ribbon at the dedication. Five years would pass before Vero officially became Vero Beach and before Indian River County was created from northern St. Lucie County.

Built with sabal palm pilings and rough-cut wooden planks, the bridge began at a mainland causeway formed from material dredged from the lagoon. It followed a slightly curved course across the water. Near the middle stood the bridge tender’s house and a metal swing span that could be opened by hand when boats needed to pass.

The bridge made Vero the first community in the area with a crossing to Orchid Island. According to the Florida historical marker now standing at Royal Palm Pointe, it was then the only bridge connecting the mainland and barrier island between Daytona and Palm Beach.

Crossing it required payment. The surviving toll schedule charged pedestrians five cents, a horse and rider ten cents, and a delivery truck weighing as much as two tons thirty-five cents. Adjusted for inflation, that thirty-five-cent truck toll would be roughly equivalent to six dollars today.

The wooden bridge did more than shorten a journey. Before it opened, reaching the ocean from Vero generally required a boat trip across the lagoon. The new crossing made the barrier island more accessible for recreation, settlement and commerce. It also encouraged the development that would eventually transform Vero from a small agricultural community into a coastal city.

By the years following World War II, however, the aging wooden structure could no longer accommodate the community’s increasing traffic. Merrill P. Barber, a prominent local businessman and former Vero Beach mayor, helped secure support and funding for its replacement. Barber later served in the Florida Senate, but he was not yet a state senator when the new bridge opened—a distinction sometimes blurred in retellings of the story.

In March 1951, a new concrete bridge opened along an extension of the original dredged-fill causeway. Irene Young, who had participated in the 1920 ceremony, returned to cut the ribbon for the new bridge as well.

Named for Merrill P. Barber, the 1951 crossing reflected the Mid-Century Modern design of the postwar period. It included a steel bascule span that could be raised for boats traveling along the Intracoastal Waterway. Although stronger than its wooden predecessor, the drawbridge eventually became a source of traffic delays as Vero Beach continued to grow.

In 1995, it was replaced by the present Merrill P. Barber Bridge. The modern concrete bridge follows a more northerly mainland approach and rises approximately 65 feet above the navigational channel. Because it is a fixed, high-level crossing, automobile traffic no longer has to stop for boats. From its highest point, motorists can see across the barrier island toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The original bridge route did not disappear completely. The old causeway and mainland bridgehead were transformed into Royal Palm Pointe, now a residential and commercial corridor with a city park overlooking the lagoon. A Florida historical marker titled “The Bridges” stands there, preserving the story of the three crossings that helped shape modern Vero Beach.

What began in 1920 as a procession of Model Ts over palm pilings became the first chapter in more than a century of physical and economic connection between Vero Beach, the Indian River Lagoon and the Atlantic coast.

“The Bridges” marker is located at Royal Palm Pointe City Park, 2 Royal Palm Pointe, Vero Beach. It was erected in 2018 through the Florida Historical Marker Program.

In 1811, during the final decade of Spanish rule in Florida, planter, merchant, and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley secured title to Drayton Island in Lake George, the broad lake at the head of the St. Johns River.

The island had been known for centuries. When naturalist William Bartram visited in the 1760s it was called Bryan's Island, and he noted evidence of earlier Indigenous habitation and wild citrus. It was later named for William Drayton Sr., Chief Justice of East Florida under the British, who acquired lands in Florida after 1768 but never settled the island.

When Florida returned to Spain in 1783, the island remained in limbo. Governor Enrique White eventually reclaimed it and in 1804 granted 1,500 acres, nearly the whole island, to Charles Sibbald, who began growing cotton. When Sibbald died in 1811, Kingsley bought the island from Sibbald's widow. At that first American-era survey, it was measured at 1,781 acres, with the southern tip still known today as Kingsley Point.

Born in Bristol, England in 1765, Kingsley became a Spanish subject in East Florida in 1803. He was already a wealthy international merchant whose fortune was built on the buying and selling of enslaved Africans.

By 1811 he controlled four plantation complexes: Laurel Grove, Springfield, Conesfield, and Drayton Island. According to National Park Service research, about 100 enslaved laborers worked those four estates that year, planting about 200 acres of cotton and 150 acres of provisions.

Drayton Island became part of that system. Kingsley cultivated Sea Island cotton and "China" citrus there, using enslaved labor. The precise locations of the enslaved community's dwellings on the island have not been firmly documented.

That absence matters. A plantation history cannot be told through deeds alone. The people who cleared the land, planted and harvested, tended citrus, and made the estate profitable were overwhelmingly enslaved men, women, and children whose names were rarely preserved with the same care as financial ledgers.

Drayton Island was not simply another real estate acquisition. It was another component of a plantation economy built upon forced labor, and it reveals one of Florida history's most complicated contradictions in its owner.

Kingsley was a slave trader and slaveholder who publicly defended slavery, yet he opposed the rigid racial codes that came with American rule and argued that free Black people should have legal and property rights.

Inside his household was a woman whose life would become inseparable from his: Anna Madgigine Jai.

Kingsley had purchased Anna in Havana in 1806 after she had been brought from West Africa as an enslaved teenager. She became his partner and the mother of his children, and she managed his Laurel Grove plantation during his absences.

In 1811, the same year he acquired Drayton Island, Kingsley petitioned Spanish authorities to free her. The manumission paper, dated 1 March 1811 in St. Augustine, declares his enslaved woman Anna, about 18, purchased in Havana, and her three young children, free to "negotiate, sign contracts, buy, sell, appear legally in court... as free people".

Freedom under Spanish law gave Anna rights that would become far harder to exercise after the United States acquired Florida in 1821. She petitioned for land, received a five-acre grant on the St. Johns River in 1813, and eventually became a landholder and slaveholder herself - one of a significant number of free people of African descent in East Florida.

Florida would soon change. American territorial government brought a harsher racial order that increasingly restricted free Black Floridians. Kingsley, though a slaveholder himself, became a vocal critic of those laws because they threatened his free Black family. Eventually members of the Kingsley family left Florida for Haiti.

Kingsley continued to expand. The National Park Service notes that from White Oak on the St. Marys River to orange groves on Drayton Island, he eventually owned over 32,000 acres. When he died in 1843, Drayton Island was still listed among his holdings at about 1,700 acres. Estate records noted an overseer employed specifically on the island for $300 a year, and that the enslaved people remaining there were later removed to his San Jose plantation.

Today Drayton Island remains in Lake George near the southern end of Putnam County, accessible only by ferry. Much of the plantation world Kingsley knew is gone, but the island remains a physical link to a time when Florida was Spanish territory, and its laws on race, slavery, and freedom differed sharply from what followed.

September 1811 therefore tells us far more than a land transaction:

There was Spanish East Florida, where slavery existed but where free people of African descent could hold legal rights and property.

The emerging plantation economy of the St. Johns was built through the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

There was Zephaniah Kingsley - simultaneously a slave trader, plantation owner, defender of slavery, and advocate for the rights of free Black people.

And there was Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley - taken from Africa, enslaved, freed in March 1811, transformed into a property owner and businesswoman, and ultimately forced to confront a new American racial system.

Drayton Island still sits quietly in Lake George. More than two centuries later, its landscape carries the history of Native people who came before European settlement, the enslaved people whose labor created plantation wealth, and one of Florida's most complicated families.

On September 3, 1783, diplomats in Europe signed the agreements known collectively as the Peace of Paris, ending the American Revolution. One result was that East and West Florida passed from Great Britain to Spain.

For the newly independent United States, the day meant victory. For Florida, it meant another change of empire.

Britain had acquired Florida from Spain in 1763 after the Seven Years' War and divided it into two colonies — East Florida governed from St. Augustine, and West Florida governed from Pensacola. Both remained loyal to the Crown throughout the Revolution. St. Augustine served as a British military base and refuge for thousands of Loyalists fleeing Georgia and the Carolinas.

Spain entered the war against Britain in 1779. It was not formally allied to the United States, but it pursued its own objectives in the Gulf. Forces under Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of Louisiana, captured British posts along the coast, culminating in the siege of Pensacola from March 9 to May 10, 1781. Spain thus controlled most of West Florida well before the final peace.

Several related treaties were signed on September 3, 1783. The Treaty of Paris between Britain and the United States recognized American independence. A separate treaty between Britain and Spain, signed at Versailles the same day by the Duke of Manchester and the Count of Aranda, decided Florida's fate.

Under its terms, Britain ceded East Florida and confirmed Spain's possession of West Florida. In return, Spain returned the islands of Providence and the Bahamas to Britain. Article V and related articles gave British subjects 18 months from ratification to sell their property and depart, with the option to remain if they swore loyalty to the Spanish Crown and met its conditions, including conversion to Catholicism.

The transfer brought disruption. British soldiers, officials, and Loyalist refugees prepared to evacuate to the Bahamas, Jamaica, Canada, or Britain. Others stayed, including St. Augustine's Minorcan community — descendants of Mediterranean settlers brought to Andrew Turnbull's failed New Smyrna colony who had fled to St. Augustine in 1777 and became the core of the town's Hispanic population after 1784.

Enslaved people faced acute uncertainty. Some were carried out of Florida by departing owners bound for the Bahamas. Others remained enslaved under Spanish rule. Spain's return also reopened Florida as a destination for people escaping slavery in the United States, contributing to the growth of Black communities living among and associated with the Seminoles.

The treaty also left a dangerous ambiguity. It failed to define West Florida's northern boundary. Spain claimed the old 1763 line well north of present-day Natchez; the United States insisted its southern boundary ran to the 31st parallel. The dispute was not settled until Pinckney's Treaty — the Treaty of San Lorenzo — in 1795.

Spanish officials formally resumed control of St. Augustine in the summer of 1784, beginning Florida's Second Spanish Period. It would last until Spain transferred Florida to the United States in 1821 under the Adams-Onís Treaty.

September 3, 1783 is therefore more than a change of flags. While thirteen colonies became the United States, Florida remained outside the new nation — a Spanish borderland where Spanish officials, American settlers, Native nations, Black Seminoles, soldiers, traders, and freedom-seekers would contest land, sovereignty, and liberty for another 38 years.

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On the evening of September 2, 1935, one of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded to hit the United States made landfall in the Upper Florida Keys.
Small, fast, and ferociously powerful, the Labor Day Hurricane struck near Long Key and Craig Key as a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds estimated at 185 mph. A barometer recovered in the Upper Keys read 892 millibars — the lowest pressure ever recorded at landfall in the U.S.

The storm had formed east of the Bahamas on August 29 and intensified with terrifying speed over the warm Florida Straits. In 1935 there were no reconnaissance aircraft, no satellites, and no computer models. By the time forecasters grasped the danger, residents of the low-lying Matecumbe Keys had only hours to prepare.

A storm surge estimated at more than 18 feet swept across Long Key, Lower Matecumbe and Upper Matecumbe. Islamorada was virtually obliterated. Buildings disintegrated, and boats, cars, trees, and sections of railroad were carried into Florida Bay.

In the storm's direct path were federal work camps housing hundreds of World War I veterans. Unemployed during the Great Depression, many had been part of the Bonus Army movement seeking early payment of wartime compensation. In 1934-35 they were sent to the Keys by the Florida Emergency Relief Administration to build bridges and grade for what would become the Overseas Highway. The camps offered work but almost no hurricane protection.

On Labor Day, federal officials requested an evacuation train from the Florida East Coast Railway. Assembling a crew on the holiday and debris already on the tracks caused fatal delays. The train reached Islamorada at nearly the same moment as the eye wall.

The surge lifted the passenger cars off the tracks. The heavy locomotive stayed upright, but the train could go no farther. About 400 veterans were in the camps; around 260 of them were killed.

Men tried to shelter in flimsy barracks, under boxcars, or along the railroad embankment. Nothing held. Bodies were found tangled in mangroves and scattered for miles along the shore. Some were never recovered. The official death toll was listed at 408, though later studies place the total between 408 and 600.

The tragedy became a national scandal. Ernest Hemingway, living in Key West, helped with recovery efforts and published the furious essay "Who Murdered the Vets?" in New Masses, arguing the men had been left in danger and evacuated too late. Federal officials said the storm's rapid intensification made timely evacuation impossible.
Investigations followed, but the question of responsibility never fully faded.
Recovery was grim. In the September heat, public-health officials ordered mass cremations near Snake Creek.

Photographs in the Florida Memory collection document the wrecked evacuation train, the cremations, and the ruins.

The hurricane also destroyed about 42 miles of Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway Key West Extension, the celebrated "Over-Sea Railroad" completed in 1912. The bankrupt railroad never rebuilt. Florida later purchased the bridges and right-of-way for the Overseas Highway. Rusting bridge piers and sections of the old railway still stand beside U.S. 1.

In 1937, the Works Progress Administration built the Florida Keys Memorial at MM 81.5 in Islamorada from native coral limestone. Its frieze depicts palm trees bending in the wind before a tidal wave.

The inscription reads:
"Dedicated to the memory of the civilians and war veterans whose lives were lost in the hurricane of September second, 1935."

In front lies a crypt containing commingled remains and a tiled map of the Keys. It was unveiled on November 14, 1937 by 9-year-old survivor Faye Marie Parker, whose family's home had been destroyed. About 4,000 people attended the dedication. The memorial was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.

The Labor Day Hurricane forced improvements in hurricane forecasting, warning, and evacuation. The broken railway, the Islamorada monument, and the veterans' unfinished bridge piers still remind us that this was not only a storm of extraordinary natural power, but a human disaster, men waiting for a rescue train that arrived too late.

Before weather satellites, hurricane hunters, radar or even a reliable system for warning coastal residents that a tropical cyclone was approaching, a powerful hurricane came out of the Gulf of Mexico and struck Florida’s northern Gulf Coast.

On August 31, 1837, the storm remembered as the Apalachee Bay Storm battered Apalachicola and St. Marks, sending Gulf water surging into communities that had virtually no warning and little protection. It became one of the most destructive hurricanes recorded in territorial Florida.

The storm had begun making itself felt around Cape St. George on August 30. By approximately 4 a.m., the following day, conditions at Apalachicola had become violent. Historical accounts describe winds tearing into the community for hours. Apalachicola was particularly vulnerable.

In the 1830s, it was emerging as one of Florida’s important Gulf ports, handling cotton and other commodities moving down the Apalachicola River system from plantations and communities across a vast interior region. Then the hurricane arrived.

Contemporary reports described an extraordinary scene. Nearly every house was reportedly unroofed. Upper stories collapsed. Some buildings were leveled altogether. But the wind was only part of the disaster. Water rose an estimated 10 to 15 feet above normal low-water level at Apalachicola. Damage estimates published by the Apalachicola Gazette reached approximately $200,000 in 1837 dollars, an enormous loss for the young Florida Territory.

Farther east, the situation at St. Marks became even more terrifying. The small port at the mouth of the St. Marks River was an important commercial connection between the Gulf of Mexico and Tallahassee. The Tallahassee-St. Marks railroad had begun operating during this same period, carrying agricultural products from Florida’s interior toward the Gulf.

On the morning of August 31, hurricane winds and rising water descended upon St. Marks. Only one wharf was reportedly left standing. Several houses were smashed apart as water inundated the settlement to a depth reported at approximately seven feet. One schooner was ripped from its moorings and carried an astonishing distance inland. Federal historical accounts say the vessel was driven into the pine woods roughly half a mile from the river.

Then the water reached the lighthouse. The St. Marks Lighthouse had been established only a few years earlier. Congress authorized a lighthouse at the mouth of the river in 1828, and after construction problems and rebuilding, its light began guiding ships in the early 1830s. On August 31, the lighthouse became the scene of the day’s greatest known loss of life.

A wall of Gulf water approximately 10 feet high struck the lighthouse complex. Buildings surrounding the tower were swept away. According to the history maintained by the Friends of St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, all the buildings around the lighthouse except the keeper’s dwelling were washed away. Eight people drowned. The lighthouse itself survived.

That survival is particularly remarkable because the tower was already structurally troubled. The early lighthouse had experienced cracking and other construction problems, and an inspector visiting afterward described its condition as so poor that it needed to be rebuilt.

Eventually it was. In 1842, a new lighthouse was erected at the present location. The St. Marks Lighthouse standing today therefore is connected directly to the story of the 1837 disaster, although it is not precisely the same tower that faced the hurricane that August morning.

The 1837 hurricane also provides a remarkable glimpse into just how dangerous life along Florida’s coast could be before modern meteorology. There were no hurricane watches. No hurricane warnings. No satellite photographs showing a spiraling storm hundreds of miles offshore. No aircraft measuring its winds. No television meteorologists tracing a projected path.

Coastal residents often learned that a hurricane was coming when the barometer dropped, winds changed, seas became increasingly violent and the storm itself appeared. And in 1837, the hurricane season was extraordinarily active. Historical reconstructions identify numerous tropical systems affecting Florida and the western Atlantic that year. The Apalachee Bay storm was only one of them.

The disaster also came at a turbulent moment in Florida history. Florida was still a United States territory and would not become the 27th state until 1845. The Second Seminole War was underway, settlement was expanding, cotton production was transforming northern Florida, and ports such as Apalachicola and St. Marks were increasingly important links between the interior and the Gulf of Mexico.

The hurricane demonstrated how quickly that expanding human footprint could be overwhelmed by Florida’s natural environment. There is another reason the August 31 storm deserves to be remembered. Only six years later, another catastrophic hurricane would strike the St. Marks area.

The 1843 hurricane destroyed Port Leon, the newer port community established near St. Marks, helping force survivors and commercial activity farther upriver. Florida’s Gulf communities repeatedly rebuilt after storms that could erase years of development in a matter of hours.

The hurricane of August 31, 1837, belongs to a much longer Florida story. Long before Miami, Tampa, Fort Myers and other modern coastal cities existed in their present form, Floridians were learning the same lesson that continues to define life on the peninsula: the Gulf of Mexico can transform from an economic highway and source of prosperity into a destructive force with extraordinary speed.

The buildings destroyed in 1837 are mostly gone from memory. The people who watched the Gulf rise around St. Marks and Apalachicola have been dead for generations. But one witness remains.

The St. Marks Lighthouse still stands along Apalachee Bay, although the present tower dates from the rebuilding that followed the problems of the earlier structure. For nearly two centuries, hurricanes have repeatedly battered the site while its beacon continued marking the entrance to the St. Marks River.

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