The History of Northeast Florida

The salt air off Cumberland Sound has a way of swallowing sound, but if you stand on the brick ramparts of Fort Clinch at twilight, the silence feels deliberate. Located on the northernmost tip of Amelia Island, Florida, the fortress is a sprawling masterpiece of nineteenth century military engineering. Its massive walls, composed of more than five million locally fired bricks, look out over the shifting sands where the Amelia River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Fort Clinch never saw a major battle. No walls were breached by cannon fire. No bloody siege defined its place in the history books. Yet, for nearly a century, visitors, park rangers, and living history re-enactors have insisted that the fort is far from empty. Of all the legends woven into the masonry of this coastal outpost, none is more enduring than the tale of "The Faithful Soldier", a phantom sentry trapped in a tragic loop, bound to the ramparts by a promise he died trying to keep. In 1847, the United States govern...

Nearly everyone in North East Florida is familiar with David Levy Yulee.  At least they think they are.  He is well known as the father of the first cross-Florida railroad connecting Fernandina Beach to Cedar Key.  There is a statue of Yulee in front of the historic Fernandina Beach railroad station.  Just across the bridge, on the mainland, there is even a town, Yulee, named after him. So who was David Levy Yulee?  Was he the enterprising visionary who built the Florida Railroad, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico ?  Was he the savvy political leader who became the first Jewish person elected as a United States Senator?  Or, was Yulee a scoundrel and slave owner who used his political ties to gain personal wealth?  Was he a forceful voice for the secession of the Southern States who did not take up arms himself in the Civil War?  Was David Yulee a traitor? David Levy Yulee may have been all of these things and mor...