50 Fun Facts About St. Augustine

A Mass and shared meal at St. Augustine's founding in 1565 is often called America's first what?

Thanksgiving. The settlers came ashore on September 8, heard Mass and then fed the local Seloy people, 56 years before the Pilgrims sat down at Plymouth.

Which Spanish admiral founded St. Augustine on September 8, 1565?

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was sent by Philip II to drive the French from Florida; within two weeks of landing he marched overland through a storm and took their Fort Caroline at dawn.

Why did its Spanish founders name St. Augustine after that saint?

Land was sighted on his feast day, August 28, 1565. The fleet then spent eleven days working up the coast and confronting the French before the settlers came ashore and named the town.

Which continuously inhabited city under the US flag is older than St. Augustine?

San Juan, Puerto Rico, was founded by the Spanish in 1521, which is why St. Augustine's claim to be the oldest city is worded to cover only the contiguous United States.

Which Native people lived in the village of Seloy, where the Spanish founded St. Augustine?

Timucua. Their chief Seloy's village stood where the Spanish landed; the Seminole, Florida's best-known tribe, only took shape in the 1700s, when Creek bands moved south.

What does 'Matanzas', the name of the inlet south of St. Augustine, mean in Spanish?

Slaughters. In 1565 the Spanish put to death most of the shipwrecked French soldiers who surrendered on its shore, sparing only a few, and the name has stuck ever since.

Which English privateer sacked and burned St. Augustine in 1586?

Sir Francis Drake was sailing home from raiding the Spanish Caribbean; when the Spanish rearguard killed his sergeant major, he ordered the whole town razed to the ground.

The Castillo de San Marcos is built from what local stone?

Coquina was quarried across the bay and ferried to the site, where Native labourers from the missions and masons brought from Cuba raised the walls.

Why did British cannon fire barely damage the Castillo de San Marcos?

Its soft shell stone absorbed the shot: cannonballs sank into the walls and stuck instead of shattering them, so the walls held firm through the sieges of 1702 and 1740.

Which agency has looked after the Castillo de San Marcos since the War Department handed it over in 1933?

The National Park Service has run the fort ever since. In 1942 Congress gave it back its original Spanish name, in honour of its Spanish history, after more than a century under an American one.

A lone US sergeant once handed over the never-conquered Castillo de San Marcos, demanding only a receipt from whom?

Florida militia. In January 1861, three days before the state seceded, Sergeant Henry Douglas, the fort's entire garrison, gave up the keys only once they had signed for the fort and its contents.

Under American rule the Castillo de San Marcos was renamed for which Revolutionary War hero, nicknamed the Swamp Fox?

Francis Marion's name went on the fort after the US Army took it over from Spain; as Fort Marion it went on to hold Seminole, Plains and Apache captives.

Plains warriors jailed in St. Augustine's fort in the 1870s became known for which kind of drawing?

Ledger art. The prisoners drew on pages from account books in place of buffalo hide; their jailer, Richard Pratt, went on to found the Carlisle Indian school.

Which fort north of St. Augustine was, in 1738, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in today's US?

Fort Mose. Spain promised freedom to people escaping slavery in the British colonies if they became Catholic and the men served in its militia, and their town guarded St. Augustine's northern edge.

Which 1763 agreement handed Florida, and St. Augustine, to Great Britain?

The Treaty of Paris handed Florida to Britain so that Spain could get back Havana, which the British had captured; most of St. Augustine's Spanish residents then sailed for Cuba.

Three signers of the Declaration of Independence were held by the British at St. Augustine after which city fell in 1780?

Charleston. Thomas Heyward Jr., Arthur Middleton and Edward Rutledge, all South Carolina signers, were shipped south after the city surrendered and went free in a prisoner exchange in July 1781.

Under which agreement, ratified in 1821, did Florida pass from Spain to the United States?

The Adams–Onís Treaty paid Spain nothing for Florida; the United States instead took on about $5 million in outstanding claims connected with its own citizens.

Which Seminole leader was imprisoned in St. Augustine's fort during the Second Seminole War?

Osceola came to talk peace under a white flag in 1837 and was seized instead; held in the fort, he was moved that winter to a South Carolina prison, where he died within weeks.

The tycoon who rebuilt St. Augustine as a Gilded Age resort made his fortune as a co-founder of which company?

Standard Oil. Rockefeller's partner wintered in St. Augustine in the 1880s, found it charming but short of good hotels and transport, and set about building both himself.

Which inventor's company supplied the electric lighting for St. Augustine's Ponce de Leon Hotel in 1888?

Thomas Edison's dynamos lit the hotel from opening day, and guests were said to be so wary of the new switches that staff were hired to turn the lights on and off for them.

Carrère & Hastings, architects of the Ponce de Leon Hotel, later designed which Manhattan landmark guarded by marble lions?

The New York Public Library. The two young partners won its design competition in 1897; the St. Augustine hotel, a decade earlier, had been their first big job, landed through Hastings's father.

Since 1968 the old Ponce de Leon Hotel has been the centrepiece of which institution?

Flagler College opened in 1968, a year after the hotel closed, and its students now eat in the old dining room beneath dozens of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained-glass windows.

The St. Augustine Lighthouse still holds its original 1874 lens of which type, named for its French inventor?

Fresnel. Rifle shots once broke 19 of the lens's glass prisms, and a local volunteer league raised the money to have it restored.

What became of St. Augustine's first lighthouse, the earliest in Florida, in 1880?

It collapsed into the sea. Erosion had been eating at the shore for years, so a taller replacement was built and lit in 1874, six years before the old tower finally fell.

The Bridge of Lions is named for its marble copies of the Medici lions, which stand in which Italian city?

Florence. The originals have stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi since 1789, after they were moved from Rome; the bridge opened in 1927, just after the land boom behind it went bust.

The Bridge of Lions connects downtown St. Augustine to which barrier island?

Anastasia Island is also where the Spanish quarried the stone for the Castillo de San Marcos, ferrying the blocks across the bay that the bridge now spans.

St. Augustine's Cathedral Basilica holds which record in the contiguous United States?

Oldest Christian congregation. The parish dates from the Mass said at the 1565 landing, but its church is far younger: the present building was not finished until 1797.

A St. Augustine park promoted since 1904 by 'Diamond Lil' McConnell trades on which legend tied to Ponce de León?

The Fountain of Youth. Ponce de León never mentioned any such spring in his own letters; a Spanish chronicler pinned the story on him in 1535, years after his death.

Where in St. Augustine was Martin Luther King Jr. arrested in June 1964?

At the Monson Motor Lodge, on the steps of its whites-only restaurant. A week later its manager poured acid into the pool to drive out a swim-in, and the photographs went around the world.

St. Augustine dentist Robert Hayling invited which civil rights group, led by Martin Luther King Jr., to the city in 1964?

SCLC. Hayling had led the local NAACP youth council, but after Klansmen beat him at a 1963 rally and the NAACP then asked him to resign, he turned to King's organisation.

What is the name of St. Augustine's annual holiday festival that illuminates the historic district?

Nights of Lights is said to borrow a Spanish Christmas custom of setting a white candle in the window; today some three million white bulbs burn over the old town for two months.

How did the English pirate Robert Searle's raiders take St. Augustine by surprise in 1668?

Posing as the Spanish supply ship, which they had already captured at sea, Searle's men got into the harbour and sacked the town; the shock moved Spain's queen regent to pay for the stone Castillo de San Marcos.

Which governor of Georgia besieged St. Augustine in 1740 and failed to take the fort?

James Oglethorpe bombarded the fort for weeks from across the bay and then tried to starve the town out; he gave up after Spanish supply boats slipped past his blockade.

Saint Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 in Thagaste, in what is now which country?

Algeria. Thagaste is now Souk Ahras; when he came home from Italy he sold his inheritance, gave the money to the poor and turned the family property into a small monastery.

Which bishop of Milan baptised Augustine of Hippo at Easter in 387?

Ambrose baptised him at Easter 387. Augustine, new in Milan as a professor of rhetoric, had first gone to hear the bishop preach only to judge whether his famous eloquence lived up to its name.

Which faith did the young Augustine of Hippo follow for about nine years, to his mother's dismay?

Manichaeism kept him as a mere 'hearer' for nine years; his doubts began when its celebrated bishop Faustus, promised as the man with every answer, could not answer his questions.

Augustine's Confessions is often described as the first Western example of what?

Autobiography in the West is often traced to this book, written around 397 to 400 as a long prayer; in it he recalls stealing pears as a boy for the thrill of it, not from hunger.

According to Augustine, what words did he hear a child's voice say just before his conversion?

'Take up and read' sent him to open Paul's letters at random in a Milan garden; the verse he hit told him to give up revelry and lust, and he read no further.

Which Germanic people were besieging Hippo when Augustine died in 430?

The Vandals were themselves Christians, of the Arian creed the old bishop had long opposed; he fell ill early in the siege and died in its third month.

Saint Augustine is regarded as the patron saint of which trade?

Brewers claim him, by tradition, because of the hard-living youth he gave up at his conversion; he is also a patron of printers and theologians.

St. Augustine is the county seat of which Florida county?

St. Johns County was one of only two counties Florida had when the United States took over in 1821: it covered the old Spanish province in the east, and Escambia the one in the west.

St. Augustine's Villa Zorayda, built in 1883, was modelled on which Spanish palace?

The Alhambra inspired Boston millionaire Franklin Smith's winter home, the city's first poured-concrete building; his method was soon copied for the grand hotels that went up around it.

Henry Flagler's Hotel Alcazar in St. Augustine once boasted the world's largest what?

Indoor swimming pool. The hotel closed in 1932, and visitors to the museum that now fills the building can eat lunch at café tables on the floor of the drained pool.

In 1993, for its centenary, the St. Augustine Alligator Farm became the first to display what?

Every species of crocodilian went on show when its Land of Crocodiles opened for the centenary; the farm had begun in 1893 as two men's collection of alligators at the end of a beach tram line.

A small house by the City Gate on St. George Street in St. Augustine is billed as America's oldest wooden what?

Schoolhouse. A heavy chain has circled the little cypress-and-cedar house since 1937, put there to anchor it to the ground so that a hurricane could not carry it off.

Which Chicago publisher bought the Hotel Alcazar in 1947 and turned it into a museum?

Otto C. Lightner, a leader of America's hobby-collecting craze, bought the empty hotel to house his own vast collections and opened it to the public in 1948.

The 208-foot Great Cross at St. Augustine's Mission Nombre de Dios was begun in 1965 to mark which milestone?

The city's 400th anniversary. The archbishop laid the cornerstone on September 8, 1965, four centuries to the day after the founders came ashore, and the cross was blessed the following year.

How do visitors reach Fort Matanzas, the Spanish watchtower on Rattlesnake Island south of St. Augustine?

By a free ferry, a five-minute crossing. The little fort was built in 1742 to guard the inlet that gave enemy ships a back door to St. Augustine.

St. Augustine's Villa Zorayda takes its name from a princess in a book by which American author?

Washington Irving, better known for Rip Van Winkle, gathered Moorish legends while living in Spain in 1829; his tale of three beautiful princesses appeared in a book three years later.

St. Augustine's 'Menorcans' were refugees who fled in 1777 from which failed colony?

New Smyrna was Dr. Andrew Turnbull's plantation, where recruits from Menorca and beyond worked as indentured servants; after nine deadly years the survivors found refuge 70 miles north in St. Augustine.