It was on September 8 of 1565 that America’s oldest city came into existence. St. Augustine, Florida was established long before the pilgrims, the war of independence or the statute of liberty. The city is an often overlooked testament to the long and diverse history of the United States.
The city changed hands a number of times during its lifetime. The Spanish established a military fort on the site in 1672 and for almost a century, it was considered a Spanish town. In 1763, the British captured the city (after sacking it twice in the past) and kept it until 1784. One of the articles of the Treaty of Paris (1783) which ended the American Revolutionary War was that the city be returned to Spanish control. By that time Spanish influence had declined around the globe and St. Augustine never fully returned to its Spanish roots.
Henry Flagler came to St. Augustine in 1883 and left a permanent mark on the city. Many of the buildings were constructed under his direction still stand today including the Lightner Museum and Flagler College. Other old buildings in the city include the Governor’s home built in 1713, the basilica of St. Augustine built in 1797 and the oldest building in the town, a Spanish style domestic dwelling built in 1706. The city is a mix of colonial, Spanish revival, Victorian and modern architecture.
As the Spanish and Portuguese empire expanded in Central and South America, The British established a tenuous presence in North America in 1607 with settlements that stretched along the east coast from Florida to Newfoundland. By 1733, the British Empire had carved out an empire as formidable as their Spanish counterparts. Originally, the entire coast was named “Virginia” after Queen Elizabeth I the “Virgin Queen”, who in the 1580s enlisted the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh to discover new lands for the British Empire. Though Raleigh’s initial attempts to establish a colony in Roanoke Island in 1584 failed, his experience would later pave the way for the successful colonies that followed. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 signaled the dawn of British naval dominance and permitted Great Britain to continue its exploration of the New World virtually unchallenged.
St. John’s and Newfoundland were early colonies as was the Roanoke Colony, founded in 1585 and the Jamestown Settlement, founded in 1607. The Plymouth Colony, originally intended for Virginia, was actually established in Massachusetts in 1620. A flow of colonies followed these original ones along the northeast coast of North America, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630. In the decades that followed, the British formed the original thirteen colonies that supplied the crown with spices and other commodities at great economic cost to the colonies. The British imposed heavy taxation policies that eventually led to an increasingly hostile political climate between the colonies and the Royal government. The original thirteen British colonies were Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
The early colonies consisted of English farmers and gentlemen who lived according to the laws enforced by a system of Proprietary Governors. The way the British first introduced and funded settlements in North America was through joint stock companies that appointed leadership through mercantile charters. Other European powers, such as the Dutch, French and Spanish had tried to establish colonies in North America but did not succeed in sustaining them.
The British would eventually take control over most of the originally settled lands through either hostile campaigns or commercial ventures, as they did in 1664 when they took the Dutch colony of New Netherland including the New Amsterdam settlement. Parts of Delaware and Pennsylvania had also been colonized by the Dutch prior to British dominance. In 1713 England acquired the French colony of Acadia as well as the rest of New France and, in 1763, the Spanish colony of Florida. In 1776, the thirteen original colonies rebelled against the British crown over representation, local laws and tax issues which by that point had become intolerable to the colonial population, this rebellion or revolution eventually led to the creation of the United States of America.
| The British Empire continued to increase its territorial holdings as it colonized the western part of North America. Vancouver Island was founded in 1849 and New Caledonia was founded in 1846 to become British Columbia. In 1867 the colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the | |
| Province of Canada combined under the name Canada. Following their defeat by the British during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) The French relinquished Quebec and Nova Scotia to England with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The signing of the Treaty of Paris marked the beginning of British dominance outside of Europe. In the century that followed, other North American territories such as the North-Western Territory would be ceded to British controlled Canada by 1870. The British influence on the colonies would later serve as a cornerstone for the legal and economic systems that the colonies formed in their independence from the crown. | |
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