The oldest American city is still a mystery to many

More than half a century before the Pilgrims established a colony at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, and 42 years before the first permanent English settlement in North America was established in Jamestown, Virginia, the Spanish founded the city of St. Augustine in the far northeast. Florida corner.

However, despite its status as the oldest continuously occupied settlement founded by non-Native people in the United States, St. Augustine is rarely mentioned in American history classes.

“I think what we’re talking about is Spanish colonial history,” says St. Augustine’s mayor, Nancy Sykes Kline. “Some people might say it’s Anglo-biased.”

Retired professor of American history Thomas Graham, who says he can trace his lineage back to the Spanish period, agrees.

“St. Augustine and Florida have been neglected for a long time,” says Graham, who taught at Flagler College in St. Augustine before retiring in 2008. “Although that changes a bit as our horizons expand.”

St. Augustine was controlled by the Spanish from 1565 until 1821, except for a brief period of English rule between 1763 and 1783. St. Augustine became part of the United States in 1821 when Spain peacefully handed over Florida lands, which had become a financial burden, to the Americans.

Today, St. Augustine is a relatively small city. It has an area of ​​10.7 square miles (27.7 sq km) and a population of about 15,000.

And despite centuries of Spanish rule, there is still little visible evidence of Spanish influence in St. Augustine because most of the buildings from that era are long gone.

“We have a plaza, we have grid-lined streets in traditional Spanish and, before that, Romanesque,” says Graham. “The streets are still here, the narrow streets, the little town buildings, and they survive as part of the oldest part of St. Augustine.”

The oldest building in St. Augustine is the Castillo de San Marcos, a fortress built by the Spanish in 1695 to protect against English attacks. The castle is now a national monument.

“It was designed to protect an entire city. Whoever controlled the city of St. Augustine and that fortress, at the time, controlled Florida territory,” says Chris Leverett of the National Park Service. “The records we have of St. Augustine being attacked describe the town being besieged by ships, soldiers occupying the town, and the townspeople taking shelter inside the fort.”

The central plaza, as well as the buildings around it, were a major part of St. Augustine’s heyday as playgrounds for wealthy Americans escaping the harsh winters of the northern states of the United States. In the 1870s, American industrialist Henry Flagler, founder of Standard Oil, decided to build three world-class hotels – Hotel Ponce de Leon, Hotel Alcazar, and Hotel Cordova – for wealthy visitors.

“He saw that wealthy northerners had discovered that St. Augustine had warm weather and sunshine in January, which New York didn’t,” says Graham. “Before, resort hotels tended to be what we thought were frontier hotels. You went to one of these and expected rough handling. You expected the accommodation and the food wasn’t going to be good. We’re going to change that,” Flagler said.

But the wealthy did not stay long. Within 20 years, the wealthy discovered that Palm Beach, Florida’s weather was better. Today, the Ponce de Leon Hotel is Flagler College and the Alcazar Hotel, once famous for its casino and huge pool, houses the city hall and museum. Only Hotel Cordova, the smallest of the three, still hosts overnight guests, but is now called Hotel Casa Monica.

However, tourism remains a major source of income for the city. More than 3 million people visited the St. Augustine area between July 2021 and June 2022. Many of them are day trippers, and the city is looking for ways to entice them to stay longer.

“We like to see the cultural visitor, the urban tourist so to speak, because we feel they will stay longer and dig deeper,” says Sykes Klein. “We have so many layers of history here that we want them to stay for a while longer so they can explore.”

The city hopes to attract more visitors as St. Augustine’s status as the nation’s oldest continuously occupied American city becomes more widely known. Centuries after its founding, the historic city is still waiting to be fully appreciated by the modern public.