Churches, government offices, and school buildings line its main traffic artery, Kennedy Boulevard. Over years ago, Eatonville looked much different as befit its location on what was then a sparsely unsettled frontier. Throughout the mid th century, Central Florida itself was largely wilderness, uninhabited, and undeveloped until after the Civil War.
In the years following the war, black settlements began organizing throughout the United States. This inspired newly-freed African Americans to create their own municipal corporations.
Between and , there were approximately black towns, settlements, and enclaves. However, fewer than became legally-recognized municipalities. Municipal organization was not easy for African Americans. They lacked many of the necessary funds and materials to build a town from the ground up.
Most noticeably, racial prejudice was very engrained in American society, so assistance from white neighbors did not come often for black communities.
The Republican-led federal government retaliated against such activity with stringent legislation. The bureau influenced freedmen to take advantage of the Southern Homestead act, a law that allowed public land to be sold cheaply to poor whites and blacks.
This act was an attempt to break the cycles of debt sharecropping, land tenancy that stopped poor southerners from buying the plentiful public lands in the South, particularly in Florida. By the s, Central Florida became the scene of feverish land purchases and settlement activity. But for African Americans, acquiring land became tougher. Former Confederates began to have their civil rights restored, retaking control of their local governments and police forces.
But freedmen and their families were persistent and eventually succeeded in forming a town of their own in Central Florida.
During the land frenzy, newly-freed slaves from throughout the south drifted into Central Florida. Some settled around Lake Lily, then called St. Known then as Fort Maitland, this community of white northerners employed the freedmen and their families with clearing land, planting citrus groves, and helping build infrastructure, including a railroad connecting Fort Maitland to Jacksonville.
However, black settlers still desired to establish and incorporate a town of their own. From to , the first attempts by black settlers to buy land were hindered by the unwillingness of white landowners to sell acreage to black folks.
In , two white men, Josiah Eaton and Lewis Lawrence, finally offered to sell black men a large tract of land one mile west of Lake Maitland. In , out of a acre tract that Eaton had bought in , some 22 acres were sold to Lawrence, a philanthropist from New York.
Hostile natives and isolation from other Spanish colonies kept Texas sparsely populated until following the Revolutionary War and the War of Mexican Independence, when the newly One of the 13 original colonies, Virginia was the first part of the country permanently settled by the English, who established Jamestown on the banks of the James River in The home state of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers, Virginia played an Louisiana sits above the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River, bordered by Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east and Texas to the west.
Originally colonized by the French during the 18th century, it became U. Founded by the French, ruled for 40 years by the Spanish and bought by the United States Colonized by Spain, the land that is now New Mexico became U. Granted statehood in , Washington was named in honor of George Washington; it is the only U. Live TV. In , an even stronger attack on St. He also failed to take the fort. Augustine to the British, accomplishing by the stroke of a pen what pitched battles had failed to do.
Augustine came under British rule for the first time and served as a Loyalist pro-British colony during the American Revolutionary War. A second Treaty of Paris , which gave America's colonies north of Florida their independence, returned Florida to Spain, a reward for Spanish assistance to the Americans in their war against England.
Upon their return, the Spanish in found that St. Augustine had changed. Settlers from a failed colony in New Smyrna south of St. Augustine had moved to St. Augustine in This group, known collectively as Minorcans, included settlers from the western Mediterranean island of Minorca. Their presence in St. Augustine forever changed the ethnic composition of the town.
During what is called by historians the Second Spanish Period to , Spain suffered the Napoleonic invasions at home and struggled to retain its colonies in the western hemisphere.
Florida no longer held its past importance to Spain. The expanding United States, however, regarded the Florida peninsula as vital to its interests. It was a matter of time before the Americans devised a way to acquire Florida.
Augustine, to the United States. For the next twenty-four years, East Florida and with it St. Augustine remained a territorial possession of the United States. Not until was Florida accepted into the union as a state. The Territorial Period was marked by an intense war with native Indians, the so-called Second Seminole War In , the Civil War began.
Augustine and remained in control of the city throughout the four-year long war. After the war, land was leased to freed slaves on what was then the west bank of Maria Sanchez Creek. Initially called Africa, the settlement later became Lincolnville and is today listed in the National Register of Historic Places, along with three other historic districts in the city.
Twenty years after the end of the Civil War, St. Augustine entered its most glittering era. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company, decided to create in St. Augustine a winter resort for wealthy Americans.
He owned a railroad company that in linked St. Augustine by rail with the populous cities of the east coast. In , his company began construction of two large and ornate hotels and a year later added a third that had been planned and begun by another developer.
Flagler's architects changed the appearance of St. Augustine, fashioning building styles that in time came to characterize the look of cities throughout Florida. For a time, St. Augustine was the winter tourist mecca of the United States. In the early twentieth century, however, the very rich found other parts of Florida to which they could escape.
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