Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Moore History: How Florida's Capital Region Came To Be?

Transcript

Moore History: How Florida's Capital Region Came To Be? · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:19
  It is five minutes after the hour, and it's the third and final hour
• 0:23
  at least for today of the Morning Show with Preston Scott, January eleventh on
• 0:28
  your calendar, And if you're tracking the shows as I do, it's fifty
• 0:32
  seventy three, five thousand and seventy three of these bad boys. And I'm
• 0:38
  Preston Scott. That's Grand Allen running the program, and I am joined by
• 0:42
  doctor Ed Moore. Time for a little more history. How are you happy
• 0:45
  New Year? Happy new to you too. I'm good. I'm just sitting
• 0:49
  here thinking if I could be here when you hit ten thousand shows, Dude,
• 0:54
  if I could be here when I'm hitting ten thousand shows, that would
• 0:57
  be an accomplishment. I have a party with streamers. Well, there's something
• 1:00
  we have, a probiotic we've settled on for the year, a new topic.
• 1:11
  We tend to switch every year, and this year explorers and Pioneers.
• 1:15
  Yeah yeah, we basically United States explorers and yeah, how it came to
• 1:21
  be the founding of the Americas and such, And I thought it would be
• 1:23
  appropriate really just to kick it off. Today is the opening of the big
• 1:29
  celebratory by centennial of Tallahassee. And I think starting about eleven o'clock today down
• 1:36
  in the Capitol and the whole area outside there, they're having vendors and displays.
• 1:42
  Well, Joe Biden be there because he was there. He was there.
• 1:46
  Yeah, he wrote his Little Corvette in and two hundred years ago.
• 1:52
  At least that's what she, Jill told him. But he's no, he's
• 1:56
  not coming. Okay. So it's sad, but it's kind of fascinating to
• 2:00
  me. I'm one of those probably I'm a geek about this kind of stuff,
• 2:04
  but if I go somewhere like the Colisseum in Rome or Westminster Abbey or
• 2:09
  whatever, I sort of get chills, you know, not literally, but
• 2:14
  you just because of who came before who you're walking in their footsteps. You
• 2:17
  know, who walked where you did. And if you do a real deep
• 2:23
  study on why Tallahassee is here and who was here and there things that went
• 2:28
  on here, this area is ripe with historical sites that most people have never
• 2:34
  gone to or visited and don't know why they're there. And that's fascinating to
• 2:38
  me. I mean the area really there were natives here, not seminoles.
• 2:45
  They weren't Seminoles didn't really even come into being until sometime during the seventeen hundreds.
• 2:51
  They started calling them that, and it was almost a nickname in the
• 2:55
  Creek language. Their words sounded like seminole meant runaway or outlaw, and if
• 3:05
  you look at the history of that tribe, that's essentially what it was,
• 3:07
  a lot of people trying to get away, tribes trying to get away from
• 3:12
  one another, small tribes, runaway slaves, outlaw type whites that went there.
• 3:20
  The Gullas from the Carolinas would come down, mixed race, and then
• 3:25
  over time they just started calling them. They got more organized, started calling
• 3:30
  the Seminoles the Indians that were here. Prior to that, though, the
• 3:35
  Natives were various tribes that were in the area, a lot of them that
• 3:39
  were Creek from the Creek coming down out of Alabama and the Red Stick Creek
• 3:46
  tribe. The Creeks had two different tribes, but the Red Sticks came and
• 3:50
  really were strong in this area. It was a very settled area. You
• 3:55
  can go down off of Myers Park and to the east of Myers Park,
• 4:00
  back in a street or so, right off the Lafayette Street, there's a
• 4:04
  state park in there. That's tucked in there. That's only a five acres
• 4:09
  or something that was part of the original it's Governor Martin way back in eighteen
• 4:15
  hundreds had a house there and it's a little small area that was a settlement.
• 4:23
  There was a settlement up on the top of the hill, the grassy
• 4:26
  area where the capital ended up being. And then there was a settlement that
• 4:30
  the Spanish ended up building the mission that's out on West Tennessee Street, and
• 4:34
  there's a hell of a museum there that people out to go visit. There
• 4:40
  was a lot of activity in this area and most people aren't aware of that.
• 4:44
  They just thought, oh well, they decided. I mean, the
• 4:47
  myth is that two guys, one from Saint Augustine and Governor Duval had these
• 4:54
  guys they wanted to create a new capital. They used to rotate from Pensacola
• 4:58
  and Saint Augustine and the ear days, that's a long way to go between
• 5:02
  those two spots. They decided, you guys, go find it. And
• 5:09
  I'm hearing the music in the background here, but we'll talk in a minute
• 5:12
  about how those two guys got here and why they decided to come here.
• 5:15
  Do we call them explorers one of them, Yes, because we better because
• 5:19
  we're talking explorers and pioneers. I think one of them was definitely an explorer.
• 5:24
  Yeah, Doctor edmore back with us and we're talking about explorers and pioneers
• 5:31
  and focusing on the bi centennial of where we're based, which is the state
• 5:36
  capital of Florida, and we were just talking about how this all kind of
• 5:42
  came to be and what it inspired. Well, you've all heard the term
• 5:47
  manifest destiny of you know, it's what they created back then. It was
• 5:50
  a marketing tool to say the United States should be from c to sea.
• 5:56
  It's sort of like with the Palestine. People are trying to use how the
• 6:00
  Palestinians from the river to the sea. Well, we wanted, we wanted
• 6:04
  to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I think the way I read
• 6:09
  it, this area and the establishment of Tallahassee as the capital was sort of
• 6:14
  the lynch pinned that occurring. Florida. East Florida, West Florida were Spanish
• 6:18
  controlled. This Spain control that, and West Florida really went all the way
• 6:24
  kind of to the Sabine Sabine River however you pronounced it way over in Louisiana
• 6:29
  Texas border. Mobile all that was part of West Florida and East Florida kind
• 6:35
  of went from the Perdido River. Perdido was in west I'm sorry, maybe
• 6:41
  the Apalachical River east. And the Spanish were only really in St. Augustine.
• 6:46
  And the reason they were interested in settling here, and I'm talking three
• 6:48
  hundred years, roughly three hundred years before Tallahassee got founded, when you had
• 6:55
  Panfilo de Novez and Hernando de Soto aim through this region, settled here for
• 7:02
  camped here, destroyed the Indian villages that were here. A Haiko which is
• 7:08
  the one that was down by Myers Park, wiped him out. When DeSoto
• 7:13
  got here, they had about two hundred and fifty buildings in their settlement.
• 7:16
  That's how big the Indian settlement was that was here. So there was a
• 7:20
  lot going on here. The US Andrew Jackson, who was you know,
• 7:26
  he was such a sterling soul, would just come down as a general,
• 7:29
  come down and just kill a bunch of people, you know. That was
• 7:32
  he raided. He took Saint Mark's they hung to British officers. The Bretz
• 7:36
  out of Fort There came in and hung two of those guys for disturbing the
• 7:42
  peace. Basically a lot of crazy stuff going on. They decided to negotiate
• 7:48
  with Spain, who was at war. You want to go global. Spain
• 7:51
  was at war with France and called the Peninsular Wars. They decided to negotiate
• 7:58
  with Spain. Spain needed money five million dollars. Basically, they settled off
• 8:03
  that they seeded East Florida the United States, and Tallahassee would have been on
• 8:09
  the border. East Florida, West Flarda, then the west part what they
• 8:13
  call West Florida. Spain didn't ced it to the United States, but basically
• 8:18
  just sort of gave it up. And during that time frame there was a
• 8:22
  rebellion. There was a Republic of West Florida. There was the Muscogee Republic.
• 8:26
  I think this the Indian tribe created tried to create a country. All
• 8:31
  kind of flags flew over the Panhandle of Florida during that period of time.
• 8:35
  Critical element though in the it was the Adams own this treaty, and it
• 8:39
  was John Quincy Adams who was Secretary of State under Monroe and the negotiator for
• 8:45
  Spain. Spain seated everything east of the Sabine River, which border is the
• 8:52
  river that goes between Texas and Louisiana. And if you look at the map
• 8:56
  and kind of go ziggi zag up towards the north west up to the forty
• 9:01
  second parallel, which became Oregon. It was the Oregon Territory. United States.
• 9:07
  Boom got all that land. They had already done the Louisiana purchase,
• 9:11
  but that only took basically what was the Missouri territory. We now went all
• 9:16
  the way to the Pacific, and then they created We're going then against the
• 9:20
  British and the Russians who also wanted that territory. All right, right back
• 9:33
  with it, doctor Ed Moore, explorers and pioneers talking about our part of
• 9:37
  the world, our neck of the woods, and the by centennial the Tallahassee
• 9:41
  is entering into this year and the development of the region. Yeah, Necessity
• 9:46
  is the mother of invention. Boy is it ever? It truly is.
• 9:50
  And Tallahassee got established because of the necessity of not having meetings of government officials
• 9:58
  in the Florida Territory one year in Saint Augustine, the next time in Pensacola,
• 10:03
  and going back and forth. It's not an easy transit now. It
• 10:07
  was horrible back then, absolutely horrible. So Governor William Pope Duval appointed two
• 10:13
  commissioners, John Lee Williams of Pensacola and doctor Williams. Simmons of Saint Augustine,
• 10:20
  to try to find a new spot. Well, doctor Simmons came across,
• 10:26
  went to Saint Mark's at the fort there and waited for John Lee Williams.
• 10:31
  And you can go listeners can go online if you google John Lee Williams
• 10:35
  journal. He kept a pretty meticulous journal of his travels to get here,
• 10:41
  Pensacola to Florida. If you've driven it, you've crossed a lot of rivers.
• 10:45
  There's a tremendous amount of rivers, and when you don't have really accurate
• 10:48
  maps, specific maps. He sailed here. He didn't take a horse or
• 10:54
  a buggy or anything. They took a small sailing craft and tried to make
• 10:58
  it for Pensacola. And the journal is fascinating. I think when you read
• 11:03
  it, you didn't say it for sure because they didn't know. I think
• 11:05
  they got hit by a hurricane at one point. He talks about what was
• 11:09
  going on and how damage everything was and they had to shelter, and he
• 11:13
  probably got hit by a severe tropical storm or a hurricane that knocked him out,
• 11:18
  and the journal goes step by step he's stopped and in the destined area.
• 11:26
  He stopped at Port Saint Joe area. He stopped in Panama City area
• 11:31
  and talked about trying to stay inland behind the Barrier islands, and yeah,
• 11:37
  I mean it's tremendous. He camped at Saint Vincent's Island, camped on Saint
• 11:43
  George Island, worked his way, then tried to go inland for a bit
• 11:46
  and had to come back to the boat. He built a raft at one
• 11:48
  point to get across what he thought was the Oak Lockney Bay, but really
• 11:54
  was Apalachicola Bay. And you know you're reading all this, I've been to
• 11:58
  all the those places, so it's very fascinating. When he finally got to
• 12:03
  the fort at the Saint Mark's River, at the bottom of the river there
• 12:07
  where the two rivers come together, excuse me. Doctor Simmons had been waiting
• 12:15
  for him for two weeks, fourteen days sitting waiting, So he made it
• 12:20
  always from Saint Augustine to there, and then had to sit there for two
• 12:24
  weeks. And then they had heard about this grassy area and this open area
• 12:30
  and came up here and it was a lot of Cascades Park, for example.
• 12:35
  Cascades Park was had a waterfall there and flowing river. It was just
• 12:39
  a nice area for settlement. And they couldn't initially decide where whether to put
• 12:48
  it down there, put the capitol down there, put it up on the
• 12:50
  hill, or put it west where the other Indian settlement had been. And
• 12:54
  now the Spanish had been interested in this area because the Indians that were here,
• 12:58
  the natives that were here, were very much into agriculture, and the
• 13:01
  Spanish wanted foodstuffs to feed their main settlement in Saint Augustine, and that's what
• 13:07
  they were looking for out of here. They decided, the two of them
• 13:11
  decided this area right here is the perfect spot. And when John Lee Williams
• 13:16
  wrote to the governor, he told him they decided the spot, but they
• 13:22
  really hadn't made up their mind yet exactly where to put to capital. But
• 13:26
  it was two very adventurous people. I mean, this was the wilderness.
• 13:33
  It stayed the wilderness for a pretty long time. You didn't have to go
• 13:37
  too far north to be not wilderness. Because Georgia was already a settled state.
• 13:43
  There were a lot of plantations, but what initially took hold here.
• 13:48
  Cotton plantations came into this area. And then after that you have the Lafayette
• 13:54
  Land grants that the Congress gave to Makita Lafayette. You had Prince Murat,
• 14:01
  Napoleon's nephew that came and settled in this area, and it was kind of
• 14:07
  a French area, and then they gave it up. But you know where
• 14:09
  the French all lived and settled and when stayed here, when they were here,
• 14:13
  Prince Muerat hotel there you go. I knew you were going to say
• 14:18
  that, no, they stayed, They stayed in Frenchtown. And that's where
• 14:24
  that came from. They all picked up and left and went to New Orleans
• 14:28
  and just got out of here Mobile and New Orleans where there were more French
• 14:31
  people there, Thank goodness. So we otherwise we'd be burdened with being the
• 14:37
  home of the Marty gross Well, I say this was the wilderness, and
• 14:39
  right this was eighteen twenty one, twenty four. When eighteen twenty four when
• 14:43
  the city of Tallahassee actually got formed, It wasn't until twenty six when they
• 14:48
  had elections. My family came to Florida in eighteen thirty five, only ten
• 14:54
  eleven years later, and it was still a wilderness. I mean, so
• 14:58
  people that came here or were a hearty punch, they they just it wasn't
• 15:03
  easy to live here. By the way, I know, for those of
• 15:05
  you constructing your email, that Mobile is the original home of the Marty Grass.
• 15:11
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they don't have to email that. I'm
• 15:15
  just, I just, I just I can feel it coming. I was
• 15:18
  joking about nor Anyway. It was a huge, huge French settlement in Mobile.
• 15:22
  Very small here in French Town. Cool good stuff. Thank you,
• 15:28
  Doctor Moore with us and each and every month we're gonna be talking explorers and
• 15:31
  pioneers this year on More History with Doctor ed Moore in the Morning Show with Preston Scott