Hello From Orlando – A Walk Through St. Augustine – The Oldest Continuously Inhabited City In The United States
On our way home from Orlando, a little more than an hour into our 20+ hour road trip back to Toronto, we stopped in St. Augustine, “the nation’s oldest city”, just north of Jacksonville – indeed the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States, having been founded by the Spanish in 1565.
St. Augustin’s founder, Don Pedro Menendez, came ashore on September 8, 1565, and chose to name the settlement after the patron saint whose feast day coincided with the day of landing. Of course, before the Spanish ever set foot on Florida soil, the Timacuan Indians had already been here and they watched Menendez and the roughly 1500 colonists and soldiers settle here. Over the last few centuries the city experienced governments from different countries, including Spain, Britain, and since 1821, the United States.
The real rise of this community came in the late 1800s when Henry Flagler (1830 to 1913) built two hotels and took over a third as part of the Flagler hotel chain. Flagler was the...