St.Augustine

Castillo de San Marcos

A cold front went through last night, so temperatures were in the low 80s, rather than the mid-90s that we’ve had for the last week. It made for a comfortable day walking the Old Town of St. Augustine. We started at the Castillo de San Marcos, built in 1695. We took the ranger tour to understand the history of this fort.  The Spanish used the fortress to store rice and other goods in the big store rooms and then armed the top of the fortress with many cannon that could shoot up to 3 miles. The British tried to besiege this fortress for over 50 days, but never succeeded. Their cannon balls would barely harm the coquina stone walls and the stores were sufficient to feed the town. In 1763, the British gained control of the Fortress and all of Florida (making the 14^th and 15^th American Colonies) by treaty. They used to Fortress to house over 500 soldiers during the American Revolution. The Florida colonies were not interested in participating in the American Revolution. In 1784, Britain ceded Florida back to the Spanish, and in 1821 Spain sold Florida to the U.S. The Fortress served as an unconquered Fort throughout this period. As part of the talk we also learned that 3 separate times the American Army used the fort as a prison for various Indian tribes, including survivors from the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. Richard Pratt was in charge in 1875 and decided that they only way to end the conflict between Americans and Indians was to educate the Indians in the American culture. He started the Indian schools here, and in Pennsylvania and this spread throughout the U.S. So we had a connection to our Arizona trip last year, where we had learned about these Indian schools.

1684 book about Pirates in the West Indies

After the Castle we started the walking tour of St. Augustine at the Colonial Quarter, this would be a must stop with kids, because the tour demonstrates the work of a blacksmith and fires a musket gun. But having just heard the history of the city, much of it was a repeat. We took a combination ticket with the Pirate museum, and this proved to be a fun museum. It gives a lot of history of pirates in the area as well as displays with many artifacts from the pirate ships and their booty. 

Ponce de Leon Hotel

The pedestrian walk through the old town was interesting. The walk has many of the old buildings of the town or recreations of those buildings when they had been taken out by fire. At the far end of the walk were three hotel unique hotels built by Flagler in the 1800’s. We also walked into the great room of the Ponce de Leon Hotel with its domed ceiling, currently serving as a dorm room and dining area for Flagler University. We head already spent 6 hours here and we hadn’t visited two other museums on our list, so I guess we’ll have to come back some time. In the evening, we met Jennifer Kennymore for dinner at a seafood restaurant about 30 minutes outside of town.