The city served as the capital of Spanish Florida for over 200 years, and became the capital of British East Florida when the territory briefly changed hands between Spain and Britain. Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819, and when the treaty was ratified in 1821, St. Augustine was designated the capital of the Florida Territory until Tallahassee was made the capital in 1824. Since the late 19th century, St. Augustine’s distinct historical character has made the city a major tourist attraction, and it is also the headquarters for the Florida National Guard. Henry Flagler, a co-founder with John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company, spent the winter of 1883 in St. Augustine and found the city charming, but considered its hotels and transportation systems inadequate. He had the idea to make St. Augustine a winter resort for wealthy Americans from the north, and to bring them south he bought several short line railroads and combined these in 1885 to form the Florida East Coast Railway. He built a railroad bridge over the St. Johns River in 1888, opening up the Atlantic coast of Florida to development. Flagler began construction in 1887 of two large ornate hotels, the 540-room Ponce de León Hotel and the Hotel Alcazar, and bought the Casa Monica Hotel the next year. His chosen architectural firm, Carrère and Hastings, radically altered the appearance of St. Augustine and gave it a skyline, beginning an architectural trend in the state characterized by the use of elements of the Moorish Revival style. With the opening of the Ponce in 1888, St. Augustine became the winter resort of American high society for a few years.
After Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad had been extended southward to Palm Beach and then Miami, the rich mostly abandoned St. Augustine in the early 20th century and began to customarily spend their winters in South Florida, where the climate was warmer and freezes were rare. St. Augustine nevertheless still attracted tourists, and eventually became a destination for families traveling in automobiles as new roads were built and Americans took to the road for annual summer vacations. The tourist industry soon became the dominant sector of the local economy. With the help of state and federal government monies, St. Augustine began a program in 1935 to preserve thirty-six surviving colonial buildings and reconstruct others that were gone. In 1965, St. Augustine celebrated the quadricentennial of its founding, and jointly with the State of Florida, inaugurated a program to restore part of the colonial city. When the State of Florida abolished the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board in 1997, the City of St. Augustine assumed control of more than thirty-six buildings that had been reconstructed or restored to their historical appearance, as well as other historic properties including the Government House. In 2015, St. Augustine celebrated its 450th year of its founding with a visit from Felipe VI of Spain and Queen Letizia of Spain.
[responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Common and Economic Policy
The European Single Market is the single market of the European Union, which has officially existed under that name since 1 January 1993. Today, the European single market is the largest co...
