ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Behind every state park, there is a story. Sometimes it’s a crazy story, really, like that of Fort Mose, almost hidden away in a tangled forest of scrub palmetto, oak and pine along U.S. Highway 1 just north of St. Augustine. Crazy, in that not many people know it exists but absolutely should. It is here, in the far reaches of Florida’s northeast corner, where one of the most important roads to Black history begins.
The ruins of Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States, lie here on a small 40-acre patch of land on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway.
I have lived in the Southeast my entire life and know the basic building blocks of history of Georgia and Florida going back to James Oglethorpe and Juan Ponce de Leon. But I had never heard of Fort Mose until I happened upon an advertisement for the Fort Mose Jazz and Blues Series, a music festival that will be held in late February at the now state park and historic site. When I first researched the fort, I came away astounded that so few know of its existence. Determined to learn more about it, my husband and I set out on a cold, gray winter morning for the three-hour drive from our home to Fort Mose.
Geography and history
To understand Fort Mose, you should get a sense of geography and history of the entire area.
Driving southward down U.S. Highway 1 from Jacksonville, we pass gigantic billboards advertising lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers, plus more signs hawking St. Augustine’s time-honored, so-called Old Florida attractions of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum and St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park. Where development hasn’t smothered the woodlands, the highway is otherwise lined by omnipresent palmettos and massive oaks drizzled with Spanish moss.
Much of the undeveloped area probably looks much the same as it did in 1513, when Ponce de Leon ventured to Florida from Puerto Rico, where he was once governor, in search of gold nuggets and the fabled Fountain of Youth, the clear spring that is supposed to give those who drink from it great health and eternal life.
Since Florida’s foundation is hard-packed sand, there is no gold, but Ponce de Leon discovered what he believed was the Fountain of Youth near a village of Timucua — local Native Americans — and the St. Augustine of today. His timing was good, with his arrival in April, when the orange blossoms, honeysuckle and wild magnolia were fragrant and sweet. He claimed the land for Spain, naming the entire peninsula La Florida, which translates to flowery, or land of flowers, or flowers galore. Something like that, anyway.
This part of Florida can be plagues-of-the-Old Testament hot and humid in summer and covered in a miasma of mosquitoes and gnats that often overstay their welcome way into fall. I couldn’t help but wonder if Ponce de Leon would have been quite so intrepid if he had landed in August instead of April.
Then in 1565, Spain’s King Felipe II sent Spanish conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles to La Florida to drive out the French and then explore and colonize it. He landed close to where Ponce de Leon had first set his boots in the New World more than five decades earlier, planted a cross and, like his predecessor, proclaimed it belonged to Spain. With him came 11 ships and 2,000 settlers. The fleet had first sighted land on the feast day of St. Augustine, the patron saint of Hippo, so the new settlement was named in his honor and now holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously occupied city in the U.S.
The genesis of Fort Mose
Fort Mose, shortened from its full Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose and pronounced MOH-say, was established in 1738 by Florida’s Spanish governor, Manuel Montiano. The word Mose, sometimes earlier spelled as Moze, Mosa, Moosa and Mossa, translates to moss. Moss is a bromeliad wonder that loves the Florida heat and humidity. It grows in big bunches, dangling from trees in filigreed drizzles of gray, its long streamers sometimes growing up to 20 feet long.
The true genesis of Fort Mose begins years before that, when in the late 1600s and early 1700s Africans began escaping on foot from slavery in the British colonies, fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida, crossing alligator-infested coastal swamps and rattlesnake-ridden woods and evading patrollers and bounty hunters. But if they were caught on their dangerous sojourn to Florida, they would be subject to torture and death, so a few gators and snakes weren’t so scary after all.
According to the Fort Mose Historical Society, during the journey the Africans sought assistance from Native Americans, so in essence the first “underground railroad” to freedom was created. Not all of the maroons, the name given to runaway slaves, survived the journey, but among the first to arrive were eight men, two women and a 3-year-old child. Word buzzed around the South that the sanctuary-like settlement existed, and more came to live on the banks of those tidal creeks and rivers to hunt, fish and garden as they pleased. By 1738 when Montiano gave Fort Mose its name, more than 100 Africans had made their way to their new home and freedom.
There were stipulations for asylum at Fort Mose, said guide Greg White Sr., who is on the board of the Fort Mose Historical Society and who showed us around on that cold Saturday.
“For their freedom, they had to agree to two things,” White said. “They had to convert to Catholicism and, for the men, they had to serve in the military.”
Pledging allegiance to the Spanish and converting to a new religion no doubt was the better option to living out life as a slave.
Although Fort Mose was a free settlement, the Spanish, who then controlled Florida, used it as a buffer against British invasion. When Oglethorpe, the British founder of the Georgia colony, marched down in 1740 from Georgia with his fellow colonists and Yemasee allies to claim the land as their own, he invaded and captured Fort Mose. The community had already evacuated to St. Augustine before the British arrived, but just over two weeks later, the Fort Mose militia, under the leadership of West African-born former slave Capt. Francisco Menendez, attacked the British and took back their land in what is now known as the Battle of Bloody Mose.
Oglethorpe retreated back to Georgia, but everything that wasn’t destroyed in battle was burned. Most of the fort’s citizens remained in St. Augustine until a dozen years later when they returned and rebuilt the billet at a new site.
The second Fort Mose lasted until 1763 when Spain ceded Florida to Britain. Facing slavery once again, Menendez and the remaining residents abandoned the fort and fled to Cuba. Over the years, Mother Nature took over and Fort Mose was overtaken by the elements and salt marsh.
Fort Mose’s significance, its legacy really, as the first free Black community was nearly forgotten until the mid-1980s when a team of archaeologists, historians, government leaders and others, under the direction of Dr. Kathleen Deagan of the University of Florida and Florida Museum of Natural History, and Jane Landers, then a doctoral student at the University of Florida, began excavating the site. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994. Despite that designation, it remains largely unknown.
Fort Mose today
The only building at Fort Mose now is the Visitor Center that includes a small yet tasteful museum. Boardwalks are built out over the marsh and overlook the shallow water where the forts once existed. As we wandered around the Visitor Center, we met Ryan Hall of the St. Johns County Cultural Events Division. When I told him I had never heard of Fort Mose, clearly the birthplace of freedom for so many, until just a few days prior, he responded, “Unfortunately, that’s a very common response we get when we talk about Fort Mose.”
Fort Mose, he also pointed out, will be the site of the first-ever Fort Mose Jazz and Blues Series from Feb. 18-26, a big-name music festival that is part of a grand effort to raise money to help the Fort Mose Historical Society for the development of additional interpretive resources and construction of an onsite fort representation.
“The event is to bring awareness to the site, which is so culturally significant,” said Hall. “But it’s also to raise funds in order to make Fort Mose more of a tourism attraction.”
The performances will be at Fort Mose in the shade of moss-covered oaks and just steps from the walkways that lead to the water’s edge. Among the confirmed artists are the 18-time Grammy Award-winning Count Basie Orchestra, Americana and roots singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah, two-time Grammy Award-winning jazz artist Gregory Porter, New Orleans deep-groove R&B and jazz group Tank and the Bangas, and Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue.
Standing on the spot of the critically important fort and taking a long look across the marsh to the Vilano Bridge where it crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, a couple of cormorants watch as an enormous osprey soars so freely across the water. I think the bird is the perfect metaphor for all of those Africans of so long ago who were courageous enough to pursue their own freedom.
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If you go
Fort Mose Historic State Park is located at 15 Fort Mose Trail, just north of St. Augustine, Florida. The Visitor Center is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday through Monday. The grounds are open daily from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m., 365 days a year. Admission to park grounds is free. A fee of $2 per adult is required to enter the Visitor Center. Children under 6 are admitted free.
For more information on Fort Mose Historical Society, call 904-823-2232 or visit www.fortmose.org. For additional details on Fort Mose Jazz and Blues Series, including where to buy tickets, visit www.discoverfortmose.com.
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