97 Fun Facts About Tallahassee

Where did Florida's government first meet in Tallahassee in 1824?

Log cabins. A proper capitol begun two years later was never finished, and from 1839 it gave way to the building that still stands in front of the modern tower.

Tallahassee was chosen as capital in 1824 for lying roughly midway between St. Augustine and which city?

Pensacola. Spain had run East and West Florida as separate colonies from those two towns, so when the United States merged them into one territory it laid out a new capital halfway between.

The name Tallahassee comes from a Muskogean word usually translated as what?

Old town. The Creek name is thought to join the words for a tribal town and for old; a Seminole town there seems to have borne it before the capital did, and some render it 'old fields'.

Which Spanish explorer's expedition wintered at Anhaica, in present-day Tallahassee, in 1539–40?

Hernando de Soto. Proof came only in 1987, when a state archaeologist poking around a building site turned up a shard of early Spanish olive jar, and then chain mail and crossbow bolts.

A Spanish expedition's 1539 winter camp in Tallahassee is often called the first US site to celebrate what?

Christmas. No chronicle of the expedition mentions it: the claim rests on the priests who travelled with the army, who would have said Mass that December.

Which Native people had their capital at Anhaica, on the site of modern Tallahassee?

The Apalachee. Spanish explorers wrote their name on early maps of the country to the north, and it stuck to a mountain range hundreds of miles away: the Appalachians.

Which French hero of the American Revolution got 36 square miles from Congress, much of it now Tallahassee?

The Marquis de Lafayette. He had spent some $200,000 of his own money on the American cause and lost the rest in France's revolution, so in 1824 Congress repaid him in cash and a township of his choosing.

Achille Murat, who settled near Tallahassee in the 1820s, was a nephew of which European ruler?

Napoleon Bonaparte. The son of the emperor's sister turned frontier planter in Florida, and there he married a great-grandniece of George Washington.

What set Tallahassee apart from every other Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi during the Civil War?

It was never captured. Local militia turned back a Union march on the city a few miles away in March 1865, only weeks before the war ended.

Which small Civil War battle was fought south-east of Tallahassee in March 1865?

The Battle of Natural Bridge. The defenders included teenage cadets from the local college that later grew into Florida State University.

What tops Florida's 22-storey New Capitol in Tallahassee?

An observation deck. The Capitol's own museum says townspeople asked for it: climbing to the cupola of the old dome for the view had been a local tradition since 1902.

Which architect of Washington's Kennedy Center designed Florida's New Capitol tower in Tallahassee?

Edward Durell Stone. His tower was the legislature's answer to a 1967 campaign to move the capital out of Tallahassee: the money for a new complex was voted five years later.

What did Florida's governor want done with Tallahassee's Old Capitol in 1978, once the new tower had opened?

Demolition. The House speaker agreed with him, but a citizens' campaign saved the building, and it reopened in 1982 as a museum, restored to the way it looked in 1902.

In the 1960s a movement tried to move Florida's capital to which city?

Orlando. The 1967 push by a Miami senator failed, and instead frightened the legislature into building the new Capitol in Tallahassee, where a plaque credits him with provoking it.

Which document did a Union general read aloud from the steps of Tallahassee's Knott House on 20 May 1865?

The Emancipation Proclamation. The reading told the enslaved people of north Florida they were free more than two years after Lincoln signed it, which is why 20 May is kept as Emancipation Day in Florida.

Florida State has the Seminoles, but what are the teams of Tallahassee's other university, Florida A&M, called?

The Rattlers. One of them, Althea Gibson, was still a student on a sports scholarship there when she broke tennis's colour bar at the US national championships in 1950.

What is the name of Florida A&M's famous band?

The Marching 100. France invited it to represent the United States in the Bastille Day parade of 1989, the bicentennial of the Revolution, and it has since marched in inaugural parades for two presidents.

Florida A&M opened in 1887 to train which profession?

Teachers. It opened as the State Normal College for Colored Students with fifteen students and two instructors, and within four years had added farming and trades as the state's land-grant college for Black students.

For 42 years, from 1905 to 1947, Florida State was what kind of institution?

A women's college. What ended it was the Second World War: so many returning veterans wanted places that men were sent to the Tallahassee campus in 1946, and it went coeducational the next year.

Which national laboratory has its headquarters at Florida State University in Tallahassee?

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It is paid for by the National Science Foundation and the state together, and scientists from around the world are given time on its record-setting magnets free of charge.

What are Florida State's colours?

Garnet and gold. By the university's account the garnet is a blend: its champion football teams of 1904 and 1905 wore purple, the students then voted for crimson, and the administration mixed the two.

Which coach arrived at Florida State in 1976 and had only one losing season in 34 years?

Bobby Bowden. The one losing year was his first, with a team that had won four games in the three seasons before he came; he went on to 28 straight bowl appearances and two national titles.

Who was Doak Campbell, the man Florida State's football stadium is named after?

FSU's first president. Doak Campbell took charge of the college in 1941 and was still in office when it became a university in 1947; the stadium that opened three years later took his name.

Florida State's 'war chant' and tomahawk chop were taken up in 1991 by fans of which baseball team?

Atlanta Braves. The chant appears to have started by accident at a 1984 game against Auburn, when students kept up a tune after the university band had stopped playing it.

Tallahassee's 1956 bus boycott came soon after a more famous one started in which city?

Montgomery. In Tallahassee it was two Florida A&M students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, who sat in the whites-only seats; early the next year the city dropped segregated seating from its bus franchise.

Which Tallahassee neighbourhood is often described as the oldest historically Black neighbourhood in Florida?

Frenchtown. The name comes from settlers who arrived from France in the 1830s and mostly gave up and left; families freed from slavery made the district their own after the Civil War.

Which Nobel-winning physicist, who predicted antimatter, spent his last years as a professor in Tallahassee?

Paul Dirac. He retired from Cambridge in 1969, took a chair at Florida State and stayed until his death in 1984, walking to his office each day and swimming in nearby lakes in summer.

For six weeks in late 2000, Tallahassee was the centre of world attention because of what?

The presidential election recount. Florida's officials certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes out of six million, and the lawsuits ran on until the US Supreme Court stopped the counting.

What did a state convention meeting in Tallahassee's Capitol vote to do on 10 January 1861?

Secede from the Union. Four years later the same building was where Union troops ran up the Stars and Stripes to mark Florida's surrender.

Which moss-draped tree arches over Tallahassee's nine official canopy roads?

The Southern live oak. By the city's own account several of the roads began as footpaths between Native villages and were later the tracks along which planters hauled their cotton to market.

Tallahassee holds Florida's all-time record for what, set on 13 February 1899?

The lowest temperature. A city that has reached 105 °F in June fell to −2 °F in the Great Blizzard of 1899, the only below-zero reading in Florida's records.

Which unusual student troupe did Florida State University set up in 1947?

A circus. The Flying High Circus has no animal acts and no professionals: its student performers rig their own equipment, sew their own costumes and put up the big top themselves.

What does a rider dressed as Osceola plant at midfield before each Florida State home football game?

A flaming spear. The ride on an Appaloosa called Renegade began in 1978, after a graduate won the permission of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which also approves the rider's regalia.

Which Florida rapper and singer took his stage name from Tallahassee, the city where he grew up?

T-Pain. The name is short for 'Tallahassee Pain', after the hard times he had there, and his hits made the studio tool Auto-Tune into a pop sound of its own.

Which post-grunge band formed in Tallahassee in the mid-1990s?

Creed. Scott Stapp, then a Florida State student, started the band with his old school friend Mark Tremonti, and its 1999 album Human Clay sold more than ten million copies.

Which funk pioneer made Tallahassee his home in the 1990s and was given the key to the city in 2024?

George Clinton. The founder of Parliament-Funkadelic told the city commission he had been there thirty years, then led the chamber in a chorus of 'We want the funk'.

The 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon was shot at which spring south of Tallahassee?

Wakulla Springs. Its clear, deep water had already stood in for the African jungle, when Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan films were shot there some years earlier.

The Florida Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee was designed to resemble which president's home?

Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Jackson had set up Florida's first American government in 1821, and the mansion completed in 1956 was modelled on his Tennessee home.

The Tallahassee Meridian, a line first measured out in 1824, is the starting point for doing what across Florida?

Surveying the land. A federal surveyor ran his chains through the woods in the year the capital was founded, and property lines across the state are reckoned from the point where his lines cross.

Which county is Tallahassee the seat and only incorporated municipality of?

Leon. The county was created in 1824, the year the capital was founded there, and named for Juan Ponce de León, the first European known to have reached Florida.

Tallahassee is the largest city in which two Florida regions?

The Big Bend and the Panhandle. It sits where the Gulf coast turns from one into the other, far from the big cities of the peninsula, which is why southern legislators have tried more than once to move the capital.

Tall Timbers, a research station on an old hunting estate north of Tallahassee, is known for studying the deliberate use of what?

Fire. Its founder, a sportsman, left the estate for research into how burning affects wildlife habitat, and the station now defends landowners' right to set prescribed fires.

Which Mississippian-culture earthworks site, built around 1200, is a state park on Tallahassee's north side?

Lake Jackson Mounds. Its builders raised seven earthen mounds, and a 1970s salvage dig in one of them turned up copper plates in the style of Etowah in Georgia, signs of long-distance trade.

In 2025 Tallahassee won which civic title for the third time?

All-America City. The National Civic League names ten communities a year, and Tallahassee, a winner in 1999 and 2015, built its 2025 bid on a plan for its Southside, a clean-energy plan and its hundred parks.

In the 2009 comedy Zombieland, which actor plays the zombie-killing survivor known only as Tallahassee?

Woody Harrelson. The film's survivors go by place names instead of their own, so Tallahassee crosses the country with Columbus, Wichita and Little Rock, hunting for the last Twinkie.

Which Amtrak train stopped serving Tallahassee in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina wrecked the tracks?

The Sunset Limited. For twelve years it had been Amtrak's one coast-to-coast train, linking Los Angeles with Florida; when Gulf Coast service finally resumed in 2025 it went no farther east than Mobile, Alabama.

Tallahassee sits at the southern end of which upland region, just above the Cody Scarp?

The Red Hills. After the Civil War, wealthy northerners bought up many of its former cotton plantations and turned them into winter quail-hunting estates.

Which future Hollywood star played halfback for Florida State in the 1950s before injuries ended his football hopes?

Burt Reynolds tore up a knee in 1955, then was critically hurt in a car crash. Florida State wore 'BAN ONE' helmet decals in 2018, styled on his Smokey and the Bandit licence plate.

Which future rock frontman studied at Florida State and was arrested at a 1963 home football game in Tallahassee?

Jim Morrison was booked for disturbing the peace and petty larceny at Doak Campbell Stadium. He soon left for film school at UCLA, and the Doors followed.

Barry Jenkins, who studied film at Florida State in Tallahassee, directed which drama that won the Best Picture Oscar?

Moonlight was shot by James Laxton and co-produced by Adele Romanski, both of whom Jenkins met at Florida State's film school.

Sara Blakely, a Florida State communication graduate, built a fortune by founding which shapewear company?

Spanx began with a trademark Blakely bought online for $150, and took off in 2000 when Oprah Winfrey named it one of her Favorite Things.

Which American sitcom sent a team of its characters to Tallahassee in season eight to plan a Sabre store?

The Office sent Dwight, Jim, Stanley and others to Tallahassee, where Nellie Bertram, played by Catherine Tate, wanted a store to rival Apple's.

Which Florida State cornerback, a three-sport college athlete, later played in both a Super Bowl and a World Series?

Deion Sanders is the only athlete to have played in both. At Florida State he also ran track, and his No. 2 football jersey was retired in 1995.

Which 1980s fitness celebrity graduated from Florida State University in Tallahassee with a degree in art?

Richard Simmons finished his art degree in Tallahassee after starting college in Louisiana, years before his Sweatin' to the Oldies videos made him a household name.

Which chocolate chip cookie brand was founded in 1975 by a talent agent born and raised in Tallahassee?

Famous Amos was the creation of Wally Amos, who left Tallahassee at 12 and became the William Morris Agency's first Black talent agent before opening a Los Angeles cookie shop.

Herman, a skeleton hauled from a Florida spring in 1930 and now in a Tallahassee museum, is what animal?

A mastodon, Herman was recovered from the depths by Florida Geological Survey staff and stands in the Museum of Florida History. State geologist Herman Gunter wrote up the find.

Catherine Murat, mistress of Tallahassee's Bellevue plantation, was a great-grandniece of which American president?

George Washington was her great-granduncle, and she later raised money to save his Mount Vernon home. Her Bellevue house now stands at the Tallahassee Museum.

Which Florida State quarterback won the 1993 Heisman Trophy but skipped the NFL to play for the New York Knicks?

Charlie Ward is the only Heisman winner to play in the NBA. He spent nine full seasons with the Knicks and reached the 1999 Finals.

Which Florida A&M sprinter is the only athlete to win both an Olympic gold medal and a Super Bowl ring?

Bob Hayes won the 100 metres and a relay gold at the 1964 Tokyo Games, then won Super Bowl VI as a receiver with the Dallas Cowboys.

Which Florida A&M graduate became the first Black player to win a Grand Slam tennis title, in 1956?

Althea Gibson took the 1956 French title, then won Wimbledon and the US Nationals in both 1957 and 1958. She had graduated in Tallahassee in 1953 after arriving on a full athletic scholarship.

Which longtime College GameDay analyst, known for wearing mascot heads, played football at Florida State in the 1950s?

Lee Corso made his first headgear pick in 1996, pulling on Ohio State's Brutus Buckeye. In Tallahassee he roomed with a teammate who became a film star.

Florida A&M theatre graduate Anika Noni Rose voiced which Disney princess in a 2009 animated film?

Tiana is the lead of The Princess and the Frog. Rose earned her theatre degree in Tallahassee before studying drama in San Francisco.

Which actor, an Emmy winner for Veep, grew up in Tallahassee and trained at its Young Actors Theatre?

Tony Hale won two Emmys as the devoted aide Gary Walsh, and is just as well known as Buster Bluth in Arrested Development.

What is the name of the Appaloosa horse that carries a rider to midfield before Florida State home football games?

Renegade made his debut in 1978 against Oklahoma State. The rider's regalia is designed and approved by the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

Which Florida State coach retired in 2019 with 2,029 wins, the most in college baseball history?

Mike Martin took his teams to 17 College World Series, though never to a national title. In his final season he became the first coach to reach 2,000 wins.

A Tallahassee club's award for college football's best receiver is named after which former Oakland Raiders star?

Fred Biletnikoff was Florida State's first consensus All-American and the MVP of Super Bowl XI. The Tallahassee Quarterback Club has given the award since 1994.

Florida State's string of last-gasp losses to Miami, starting in 1991, is known by which name for the missed kicks?

Wide Right began when Gerry Thomas missed a 34-yard kick with 29 seconds left in 1991. Three more such misses followed over 12 years, plus one 'Wide Left'.

Which rebuilt Franciscan mission in Tallahassee was Spain's western Florida capital until it was destroyed in 1704?

San Luis was evacuated and destroyed by its own residents so that raiders from Carolina could not use it. Its rebuilt council house could hold 2,000 to 3,000 people.

Maclay Gardens, begun in Tallahassee by a New York financier in 1923, is built around azaleas and which other shrub?

Camellias and azaleas form the backbone of the gardens Alfred Maclay planted on an estate he called Killearn, after his family's ancestral village in Scotland.

Mules pulled trains for 20 years on the 1830s Tallahassee Railroad, which ran south to which Gulf port town?

St. Marks was the end of one of Florida's first two railroads, which had no working steam engine until 1855. Its railbed is now a 16-mile state park trail.

Which Tallahassee green space, reopened in 2014 on an old gasworks site, marks the spot that drew the city's founders?

Cascades Park is named for a waterfall that so charmed two site commissioners that they put the new capital on a nearby hill. Toxic waste from a gas plant kept it shut for years.

The Tallahassee Automobile Museum's collection of more than 170 cars includes three of which famous screen vehicles?

Batmobiles, three of them, share the floor with an 1894 Duryea, a 1948 Tucker and a DeLorean in businessman DeVoe Moore's collection.

Which Tallahassee mansion, built about 1840 by territorial governor Richard Keith Call, later housed a 1950s governor?

The Grove was home to Governor LeRoy Collins from 1955 to 1957 while the present mansion was being built. His wife was Call's great-granddaughter.

Which interstate highway crosses the north side of Tallahassee on its way from the Alabama line to Jacksonville?

I-10 was first drawn closer to downtown Tallahassee, roughly along today's US 90, before planners settled on the route across the city's north side.

Which Baptist minister led Tallahassee's 1956 bus boycott and is honoured with a statue at the city's bus terminal?

C. K. Steele, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church from 1952, went on to serve as the first vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Tallahassee's Union Bank, Florida's oldest surviving bank building, was chartered to finance plantations of which crop?

Cotton planters were its customers, but the bank shut in 1843, sunk by the Seminole Wars, unsound lending and the long slump after the Panic of 1837.

Cannonball Adderley, who grew up in Tallahassee and studied at Florida A&M, became a jazz great on which instrument?

Saxophone, specifically the alto, took him into Miles Davis's sextet and onto Kind of Blue. He is buried in Tallahassee's Southside Cemetery.

Which rock band formed in Tallahassee in 2005 from two local groups, Kid Named Chicago and Defining Moment?

Mayday Parade sold more than 50,000 copies of a debut EP, Tales Told by Dead Friends, with no record label behind them.

Which indie band led by John Darnielle named a 2002 album Tallahassee, its first on the British label 4AD?

The Mountain Goats devoted the whole record to a married couple on the brink of divorce, recurring characters whom fans call the Alpha Couple.

Which rock and roll singer scored his first chart hit in 1959 with a song titled Tallahassee Lassie?

Freddy Cannon built the song from words his mother wrote. Several record companies turned it down before it sold over a million copies.

Florida State chemist Robert Holton achieved the first total synthesis of which cancer drug, first found in yew bark?

Taxol could be made at scale thanks to a process Holton's Tallahassee team devised in 1989. More than a million patients have since been treated with it.

Florida State graduate Norman Thagard became the first American to launch aboard which Russian spacecraft, in 1995?

Soyuz TM-21 took him to the Mir space station, and he came home on a shuttle. He then retired from NASA and joined the Florida State faculty.

Florida State's ballpark honours Dick Howser, who managed which team to its first World Series title in 1985?

Kansas City Royals fans saw Howser win it all two years before his death. As a Florida State shortstop he had hit a school-record .422 in 1956.

Which Oscar-winning actress from Bascom, Florida, studied at Florida State before graduating from Boston University?

Faye Dunaway won her Best Actress Oscar for the 1976 satire Network. She also studied at the University of Florida along the way.

The restored Old Capitol in Tallahassee is recognisable for which red-and-white striped feature on its windows?

Awnings in candy stripes belong to the building's 1902 look, to which it was restored in 1982 along with its art glass dome.

Bradley's Country Store, a 1927 landmark north of Tallahassee, grew out of a kitchen business selling which food?

Sausage was what Mrs. Bradley began selling from her kitchen in 1910. The 31-acre complex on Centerville Road also pressed sugar cane for syrup.

After a big away win, Florida State footballers bury a piece of what from the stadium in a campus cemetery?

Turf has gone into the Sod Cemetery since 1962, when a professor dared the team to bring some back from Georgia's Sanford Stadium. They won 18–0.

Sculptor Jim Gary's 23 dinosaurs, scattered around the Tallahassee Museum grounds since 2011, are made from what?

Car parts that others had discarded became his near life-sized skeletons, which some critics likened to Picasso's bull's head made from a bicycle seat.

After four decades as an independent, Florida State football began play in which conference in 1992?

The ACC took in a program that had been independent since 1951, and that won its first national championship in only its second season as a member.

Florida State won its first football national championship by edging which team 18–16 in the 1994 Orange Bowl?

Nebraska led 16–15 with 1:16 left, but Scott Bentley's fourth field goal put Florida State ahead and a last 45-yard Cornhusker kick missed.

Which 2016 hurricane, Tallahassee's first direct hit in 31 years, cut power to about 80 percent of the city?

Hermine brought down trees across the city and blacked out Florida State University. No hurricane had struck Tallahassee head-on since 1985.

Tallahassee's first airport, dedicated in 1929, honoured Captain Dale Mabry, who died commanding what kind of craft?

An airship, the Army's Roma, crashed at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1922 with the Tallahassee-born Mabry in command. His airfield later became a college campus.

Fined after a 1960 Tallahassee lunch-counter sit-in, Patricia Stephens Due and seven other students chose what instead?

Going to jail rather than pay $300 made theirs one of the nation's first jail-ins. Due served 49 days for sitting at a whites-only Woolworth's counter.

Tallahassee's daily newspaper, founded in 1905 as a weekly with True in its title, goes by which name?

The Democrat started life as the Weekly True Democrat and went daily for good after the 1915 session of the Florida Legislature.

Sir Harold Kroto, a Florida State chemistry professor from 2004, shared a Nobel Prize for discovering which molecules?

Fullerenes include C60, a cage of carbon atoms with the symmetry of a football, which Kroto named after the dome designer Buckminster Fuller.

Florida A&M's 1908 library, now home to its Black Archives, was paid for by which tycoon?

Andrew Carnegie's library went to the campus because the city of Tallahassee refused one: under his rules it would have had to serve Black readers.

Which endangered big cat lives at the Tallahassee Museum alongside red wolves, black bears and white-tailed deer?

Panther here means the Florida panther, one of the endangered native species the museum keeps on its grounds.