>>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

>>On this edition of Florida Road Trip, we're headed up the East Coast.

Come join us on our travels as we find the unique stories about the city of St. Augustine.

Buckle up.

Road Trip is back on the road.

[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Allison Godlove, your history travel guide for this episode of Florida Road Trip.

I'm here in the plaza in downtown St. Augustine.

The Spanish landed here 55 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, thereby cementing this city's place in history for more than four centuries.

>>There are very few places anywhere in the United States where it's more exciting and relevant to teach American history than in the nation's most continuously inhabited city within the continental United States.

>>Ponce de Leon discovered Florida in 1513, naming it La Florida and claiming the land for Spain.

For the next 50 years, the Spanish tried multiple times to settle in Florida and failed.

When the French were able to establish a fort near Jacksonville, the Spanish king sent a fleet led by Pedro Menendez to remove them.

On September 8, 1565, Pedro Menendez and his fleet landed in the area we now call St. Augustine.

>>It was absolutely unacceptable for the Spanish king to allow the French to get a foothold in this area that Spain had claimed.

Begins a military campaign to eliminate the French presence up north, which he does, and then comes back and gradually the settlement begins to develop.

>>St.

Augustine became a military outpost for the Spanish and a mission ground to convert people to Catholicism.

As the military attacks increased on the city, the Spanish began building the Castillo de San Marcos in 1672.

It's one of two forts built of coquina, a mixture of limestone and broken shells.

While the fort changed ownership over the years, it's important to note it was never taken by force.

>>The Spanish background of St. Augustine is what makes it so incredibly relevant when we compare it to American history in the British colonies.

To understand things like the Stono slave rebellion that occurred in South Carolina, it only makes sense to understand that slaves were trying to get to Spanish Florida because with conversion to Catholicism and a pledge to join the militia, slaves could inherit their freedom.

That was unlike any other territory, any other region in the United States at that time.

>>The city remained under Spanish rule until 1763.

That's when the French and Indian War ended, and the Treaty of Paris was signed, giving Florida to the British.

A second treaty was signed in 1784, returning Florida to Spain as a thank you for helping the Americans in the war against the British during the American Revolution.

Not long after, Spain's interest in the Western colonies dwindled and through negotiations with the U.S., Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821.

The Castillo de San Marcos might be one of the most recognizable landmarks in St. Augustine, but as you travel toward the historic district, you're first likely to see a giant cross at the Mission Nombre de Dios.

>>I think when we talk about the significance of the Mission, we really do need to recognize the people that were here before.

It's not as if history starts when the Spanish arrive.

So this is the area that was inhabited by what we call today the Timucua Indians.

They were here at least 500 years before the Spanish arrived.

>>In 1565, Spanish conquistador Pedro Menendez arrived with 11 ships and 800 people.

>>Menendez is what we would call a devout Catholic.

So he came very much with the idea of evangelizing.

So, yes, he was a famous seaman, he was a military leader, but he was also completely dedicated to evangelizing the Native Americans.

>>Conversion to Catholicism was largely unsuccessful until the arrival of the Franciscans, a Catholic religious order named after Saint Francis of Assisi.

>>They seemed to be able to set in motion what, from their perspective, is going to be understood as a successful missionary dynamic.

They begin to develop an understanding of the language so that they can preach and then what happens also, of course, there are natives who are learning Spanish so they can help in the translation as well.

But it's not until the mid 1580s that there's going to be a formal Franciscan Mission here known as Nombre de Dios, the Name of God.

>>If you visit the Mission grounds today, you'll see the great cross built to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the city.

You'll find spots for meditation and prayer, a replica of a stone chapel and cemetery plots.

Even today, the Mission continues to make its mark in Catholic history.

In 2021, the pope granted a rare honor.

>>Pope Francis has recognized the image of Our Lady of Nature as significant to the Catholic faith, both here locally and throughout the world.

So for the celebration in 2021, the cardinal actually of Madrid came over here to crown that statue in honor of Mary.

>>When visiting the historic part of downtown St. Augustine, the Castillo de San Marcos, the narrow streets, the architecture all reminds you of the Spanish influence on the city.

You'll also find the influence of Henry Flagler.

Northerners started coming to St. Augustine during the winter because they were battling sicknesses like tuberculosis or other respiratory illnesses.

The sunshine, the warm weather and the salty air seemed to offer relief for their symptoms.

>>One of the wealthy men who visited St. Augustine was Henry Flagler.

He brought his first wife, Mary, down to St. Augustine because she was ill.

The Flaglers spent well, not much time, in fact, just one day in St. Augustine, and Flagler wrote he didn't like St. Augustine.

The accommodations and the food were terrible.

>>Flagler didn't return to the city for almost a decade.

His first wife died.

He remarried and he tried a new modern resort that was built across from the iconic fort.

He wasn't a fan of the accommodations, but felt it was an improvement from his last visit.

>>Flagler said okay, I'm going to build a hotel in St. Augustine.

That is a first class hotel.

He brought down chefs.

He brought in laborers, maids, bellhops, waiters to have first class help in his hotel.

>>Flaglers first hotel in the city, the Ponce de Leon.

>>Now Flagler, an enterprising man realized that in order to make it easily accessible to people from the north, the railroad transportation north needed to be improved.

>>He purchased the railroad from Jacksonville to St. Augustine and improved the tracks.

By the time the hotel opened, it only took 30 hours to travel between New York City and St. Augustine.

But he didn't stop there.

>>So in addition to the Hotel Ponce de Leon across the way, he built the Hotel Alcazar.

The Alcazar also had therapeutic baths.

And then there was a large indoor swimming pool.

Also, you could catch a carriage at the Alcazar and take a ride down to the south end of town where Henry Flagler had built a nine hole golf course.

>>Flagler purchased a third hotel that was partially built, but which had stalled in construction due to financial issues.

>>So he ended up with three hotels: Ponce de Leon, the Alcazar, and the Casa Monica.

Today, they are the focal point of the Flagler era in St. Augustine.

Only one of them, the Casa Monica, is still a hotel today.

The Ponce de Leon Hall is the centerpiece of Flagler College, which was established in 1968.

It's recognized as a national historic landmark.

The Alcazar is now home to a city hall and the Lightner Museum.

St. Augustine eventually became the permanent residence for Henry Flagler, as well as his final resting spot.

>>It's my little stowaway, this is Cobbler.

She's my pi-rat.

>>Across from the fort is the Colonial Quarter, a space offering visitors a chance to experience Saint Augustine, circa the 1700s.

>>We have a building built in 1740.

We have a blacksmithing shop from the 1700s.

We do the cannon demonstrations.

>>The two-acre space introduces you to jobs from the colonial period.

>>Blacksmiths, you had Coopers, you had cobblers, you had tailors, leather working was big, you needed your armory.

>>And a job we may not think about.

>>When the French invaded St. Augustine, they were slaughtered by the Spanish.

But those few that they let survive had a very specific job that the Spanish didn't bring with them.

That was musicians.

They actually let the musicians survive.

>>You'll also find a shipbuilding project that's been in the works for the past eight years.

>>We were trying to be very authentic with it, using nails from our blacksmith shop, wood from the surrounding area, trying to build this ship just like they would have back in the day, all the way down from the skeletal structure of the ship down to the oakum, which is oak shavings and cotton twisted together stuffed between each board in the tar they paint all over the ship.

>>One walkway displays flags of the different countries who laid claim to St. Augustine over the hundreds of years.

>>Now they call it black iron because, well, it's black and it's iron and that's where we get the term blacksmithing from.

From the iron that used to work with and from the term smith comes from the word smite to smack something with a hammer.

>>One group of immigrants in Florida you may have never heard much about are the Minorcans, but they've been a part of this city's culture for generations.

And it's one more layer of history you'll discover here.

>>The Minorcans to St. Augustine are a lot like the Cajuns to Louisiana.

Now, both groups came from far away.

They spoke another language.

They stayed on to become the old timers, and they brought with them their culture and cuisine.

>>A Scottish physician named Andrew Turnbull owned 100,000 acres of land near the New Smyrna Beach area in Florida, where he planned to grow and harvest indigo.

At the time, indigo was considered more valuable than gold.

To farm it, he needed to recruit help.

>>He was able to talk 200 Greeks into signing contracts of indenture.

He had associates recruiting in Italy.

The Italians that were created were taken to Minorca, a British port at that time.

And as Turnbull and his associates recruited around the Mediterranean basin, they would bring the recruits to Minorca.

>>The recruitment took nearly two years and during that time many of the men brought to the island married Minorcan women.

>>By the time Turnbull left Minorca, he needed eight ships.

He had some 1,400 people.

>>The trip took three months across the Atlantic.

When they arrive in Florida in 1768, they were the largest single group of European settlers to come to North America during the colonial era.

The settlers went to work right away, planting and farming indigo.

They quickly found it to be a more difficult process than they planned.

>>The Minorcans worked hard.

This this mixed ethnic group worked hard knowing, you know, 5 to 7 years we have fulfilled our contracts and we'll be given 50 acres of Florida land.

At nine years, nobody was being released from a contract.

And Dr. Turnbull said, what you got to understand, you didn't read the small print.

You know, you are in service until 5 to 7 years after the plantation makes a profit.

>>After realizing they wouldn't be released as expected, a small group of monarchists made their way to St. Augustine to ask the British Governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonin, for asylum.

Tonin agreed to provide them sanctuary.

>>Remainder of the Minorcans walked three days, three nights up here to St. Augustine, relocating and once again having to start over.

>>And they stayed.

In 1784, when the Spanish regained Florida and the British left, they stayed.

In 1821 when Florida joined the United States and the Spanish left, they stayed.

>>One out of every ten people potentially you might meet in Saint Augustine has Minorcan in their background.

>>For nearly 250 years, Minorcans have been a part of St. Augustine's history.

While St. Augustine's history began more than four centuries ago.

It's also played a pivotal role in the United States more recent history.

>>St.

Augustine has had its share of conflicts.

In the summer of 1963, sit-in demonstrations and shooting incidents between white and Negro youths caused considerable tension in the city.

>>This is a community that has a lot of America's story embedded in it.

It's not like a city.

It's just a little community inside of downtown St. Augustine which is not that large.

A lot of firsts happen here.

The first free black settlement Fort Mose is here in St. Augustine.

That goes back to the 1700s.

>>Slaves escaped the areas of Georgia and the Carolinas when they found the Spanish would grant their freedom at Fort Mose.

>>So in essence, Florida has the first sanctuary city right here in St. Augustine.

It was like the Underground Railroad that came south before there was an underground railroad going north.

>>Lincolnville began as a freed man's town after the Civil War in 1866 >>And you come into the early 1900s with Jim Crow, in spite of that, the community grew even more because now blacks were kind of forced to move into segregated areas and do business within those communities.

So Lincolnville prospered during that time.

Up until the 1960s, where the civil rights movement became so prevalent here in the community.

>>At a time when Negroes throughout the South and across the nation have organized demonstrations and civil disorders to call attention to their demands for more civil rights.

>>In the summer of 1963, you had sit ins at the Woolworth counter here in St. Augustine.

And several people were arrested, teenagers, high school students.

>>St.

Augustine, like every other southern community that had to face these injustices organized.

They mobilize, they protest, they staged economic boycotts, and they faced a degree of racial violence that was steep even for the South at that time.

One of the things that happened in St. Augustine during the 1960s is that it was the first city to celebrate its quadricentennial.

There was a local movement to have black representation on those celebration committees.

It didn't happen.

There were protests.

There were official boycotts.

And ultimately, what that led to was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his organization, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came to St. Augustine, staged a campaign at one of the most vital times in this nation's civil rights history.

>>Would go out on these marches around town and march around the square and then come back.

But they were faced with violent mobs that attack them more than once.

>>St.

Augustine was the only SCLC campaign where medical expenses exceeded legal fees.

St. Augustine was more violent than Birmingham, than Selma, than the Albany campaign.

>>We had a demonstration that they said sort of like the shot heard around the world, which was the picture of acid being poured in a pool at the Monson Motor Lodge.

And that picture, that photograph was in international newspapers everywhere.

And it was like an embarrassment.

>>We know now from testimony by people like Senator James McGovern that congressmen were discussing that photographs when they voted on the Civil Rights Act the following day.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most far reaching civil rights legislation that this nation has ever passed before or since.

It was signed into law on July 2nd, 1964.

And with that, St. Augustine played a crucial role in this nation's civil rights history.

>>Today, the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center offers the opportunity to take a trip through the history of the community.

It's home is Excelsior High School, built in 1924 as a segregated school for Lincolnville.

And even though it's Lincolnville history, it's also it's our, it's our Florida history.

And it's our national story because this community was like a lot of other communities across the country who had similar kinds of stories.

>>This is St. George Street.

It's one of the most recognizable areas of St. Augustine, and it was one of the main streets in the early years of the city.

It's closed to cars now, but it's full of shops, restaurants and art galleries.

Artist Earle Cunningham had an antiques and curio shop here.

It was one of many, but its location in the ancient city landed his place in American art history.

>>Cunningham was known as the Dragon of St. George Street, and this was for his curmudgeonly attitude when he was asked to see some of his paintings.

His shop was always open, but his gallery space was almost always closed off and he had signs saying that none of his pieces were for sale.

What makes Cunningham's paintings unique are that he's a self-taught artist, so he uses different kinds of perspectives and colors that you normally wouldn't find in a typical painter who's trying to go for a realist kind of vein.

>>Earl Cunningham's Love of the sea is showcased in his work.

He was born in Maine and learned to sail early in his life.

He traveled up and down the East Coast before settling in St. Augustine in 1949.

His paintings were made in the timeframe of the fifties through the seventies.

But you're not likely to see that in his art.

>>What he was doing was bringing this nostalgia back to these works in a time where there was rapid amounts of change.

It was post-World War.

He was creating these scenes where you only got these shipping vessels.

There were no cars, there were only horse drawn carriages, and there were a lot of different people as well.

So he incorporated both settlers as well as Native Americans in his pieces.

>>The Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando is home to the largest collection of Cunningham's art.

It all started with a visit to St. Augustine by one of its founders, Marilyn Mennello.

>>In 1969, Marilyn had a trip to St. Augustine with a friend, and she was walking around and sightseeing and seeing some of the shops.

And she stopped by Cunninghams space.

And at first she wasn't really interested in any of the trinkets or anything that he had in his space.

But as she started to leave and walk away, she saw that extra gallery and really fell in love with his work and talked with him, really got to know him and he was able to close up his shop and take her in the back to see floor to ceiling the paintings that he had created.

>>When Earl Cunningham died, the Mennellos worked hard to find as many of his paintings as they could.

She acquired 350 pieces, and now nearly 80 of them are part of the collection on display at the Mennello Museum of American Art.

That wasn't enough.

They also wanted his work to be recognized on a larger scale as part of American art history.

Marilyn was invaluable in getting his work to different collections, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Of his paintings, you will always see something that you're interested in and see something that is this really safe harbor.

>>When you walk the streets of St. Augustine, it's not uncommon to come across people wearing clothing from different time periods.

On one, you could bump into a Spanish conquistador and then on the next, a British colonist.

And you may also cross paths with a pirate.

And pirates are fun.

But why St. Augustine?

>>There's a really important historical purpose behind the existence of pirates, which explains even in more detail the conflicts, the rivalries, and the unique history that made St. Augustine what it is today.

Pirates play a function in the ways that governments conducted war against each other.

Pirates were basically like free agents, and they made most of their living by pillaging.

Now, if you have a government decree, for example, the Spanish would give pirates a decree saying that you can do all of this on behalf of the Spanish crown.

And the group that we really want you to target, are those dastardly English.

We want you to attack.

We will let you keep a majority of the plunder that you get.

But we really want you to make life difficult for the English so that they don't try to attack and take St. Augustine again.

The privateers or the pirates that would either attack or defend places like St. Augustine from British or French incursion play an important role in the way that the history plays out.

>>Every privateer was considered a pirate by somebody.

Every pirate was a pirate.

And not all of them had the letters of Mark or the letters of permission to be a privateer.

There's an easier way to understand the difference between a pirate and a privateer.

That easy way is to just say, Which end of the weapon are you standing on when we meet?

If you're standing on the business end of my weapon, more than likely I'm a pirate.

If you're standing on the back side of the weapon with me, I'm probably protecting you in the name of our country, our king and or queen.

And I would be listed as a privateer.

>>The Pirate and Treasure Museum is home to many pirate relics.

>>We do have one of only three authentic pirate flags in the entire world.

We have the only documented pirate treasure chest that belonged to Captain Thomas Tew.

>>You'll also find an area dedicated to the Pirates of Hollywood.

>>We have the sword and Jack Sparrow used in the very first Pirates of the Caribbean.

That sword was used by him to stab Barbosa in the heart.

We have a cartoon still of Peter Pan and Captain Hook.

And we have a first edition, 1883, copy of Treasure Island.

>>And while we all may enjoy a great pirate movie, it's important to separate Hollywood from history.

>>A lot of people don't truly understand that point.

Pirates were criminals.

The movie is sort of just a bunch of good old boys having a good time.

But in reality, we were criminals.

Pirate attacks on St. Augustine from 1565 to 1695.

The finishing of the fort over there, 130 years.

As many as six, seven, eight, maybe nine pirate attacks on St. Augustine in this time frame.

>>There are very few places in the U.S. that tell as much of our history as St. Augustine does.

We're lucky to have 450 years of it in our backyard.

Thanks for joining me for Florida Road Trip.

I'm Alison Godlove.

Until next time, I hope you'll continue to explore the history that surrounds each of us every day.

>>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.