Florida: history and heritage

About Florida: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Florida Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Florida has the oldest European-founded city in the United States and its newest frontier, the launch pads of the Space Coast. In between lie five centuries of Spanish, British and American rule, the Seminole Wars, railway booms, Art Deco hotels and the arrival of millions of newcomers from the Caribbean, Latin America and the rest of the country.

At a glance

Population: 21,538,187 (US Census Bureau, 2020 Census), the third most populous US state.

Names: La Florida, “land of flowers”, named by Juan Ponce de León in 1513, at Easter (Pascua Florida).

The oldest European-founded city in the United States, and the launch pads of the Space Coast.

Peoples: the Timucua, Apalachee, Calusa and Tequesta; the Seminole and Miccosukee; Spanish, British, African and American settlers; and newcomers from Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico and across Latin America.

Shaped by: Spain (1513–1763 and 1783–1821), Britain (1763–1783), the United States from 1821, statehood in 1845, the railroads and the twentieth-century migrations.

The first Floridians

People lived in Florida for more than 12,000 years before Europeans arrived. The Timucua in the north, the Apalachee in the panhandle, the Calusa in the south-west and the Tequesta in the south-east built towns, mounds and canals. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Creek peoples moving south formed the Seminole, joined by Africans who had escaped slavery; they resisted removal through three wars, and the Seminole and Miccosukee live in Florida today.

La Florida and St Augustine

Juan Ponce de León named La Florida in 1513. In 1565 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the continental United States. Its coquina-stone fortress, the Castillo de San Marcos, was begun in 1672 and never taken by force. Fort Mose, just north, was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States.

Britain, Spain and the United States

Florida passed to Britain in 1763, back to Spain in 1783 and to the United States in 1821; it became a state in 1845. Key West, Pensacola and St Augustine still show the mix of Spanish, British, Bahamian and American building.

Rails and resorts

In the 1880s and 1890s Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway and Henry Plant’s railways on the Gulf opened the state to tourism, with grand hotels in St Augustine, Palm Beach and Tampa; Flagler’s line reached Key West across the sea in 1912. Cuban cigar makers built Ybor City in Tampa from 1886. The land boom of the 1920s created Miami Beach and Coral Gables.

The Space Coast and the modern state

Apollo 11 left for the Moon from the Kennedy Space Center in July 1969, and launches still light up the sky over Cape Canaveral. Walt Disney World opened near Orlando in 1971. After 1959 Cuban exiles transformed Miami, and Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans and others followed, making Florida one of the most diverse states in the country.

Our advice: begin in St Augustine at the Castillo de San Marcos and the Spanish Quarter, see a launch or the Apollo/Saturn V Center at Kennedy, and end in Miami’s Little Havana: five centuries of Florida in one trip.

Sources

Population: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census. History: National Park Service (Castillo de San Marcos; Fort Mose); Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources; NASA Kennedy Space Center; Seminole Tribe of Florida (Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum).

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