The History of Northeast Florida

Long before the Underground Railroad ran north toward Canada, there was a trail that ran south into the salt marshes of Northeast Florida. The destination was Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (known simply as Fort Mose), just North of St. Augustine, established in 1738 as the first legally sanctioned, free Black community in what is now the United States. Rather than following the North Star toward Canada, these early freedom seekers looked to the Southern horizon, where the Spanish flag offered a legal sanctuary that did not exist anywhere else on the North American continent. Escaping from British plantations in the Carolinas and, after 1733, the newly established colony of Georgia meant venturing into an incredibly hostile wilderness. The route spanned over 300 miles of undeveloped frontier. The journey began by slipping away into the dense, muddy cypress swamps of South Carolina. These areas were easy to get lost in, filled with venomous snakes, and physically exhausting to tra...

               For Jonathan Dickinson, a prosperous Quaker merchant, a journey meant to secure his family’s future in Pennsylvania in the late summer of 1696 instead became a descent into a harrowing fight for survival. When his ship, the Reformation , ran aground on the shores of modern day Jupiter Island , Florida , it set off a chain of events that would yield one of the most vivid, terrifying, and historically significant tales of captivity in early American history. Jonathan Dickinson was not an adventurer by trade.  He was a man of commerce and faith. Born in Jamaica to a prominent English family, he had built a comfortable life managing plantations and trading goods. By 1696, however, the political and spiritual situation in Jamaica prompted him to relocate his family to Philadelphia , the rapidly growing heart of William Penn’s Quaker experiment. On August 23, 1696, Dickinson boarded a three mast vessel, the Reform...