A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FORGOTTEN COLONY
Stephen Valdes
Florida was the first colony to have its own militia, by 1567, during its time as a territory of Spain. Tensions between England and Spain played out across East and West Florida over the next 200 years. British West Florida was an English colony, which included parts of what is now Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama, from 1763 until 1783, until the Peace of Paris declared an end to the First British Empire and the hostilities between England and Spain. Florida had been asked to join the Revolution in 1774 by the Continental Congress, but the offer was refused. The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 ceded Florida to the United States, but was not in effect long as Mexican independence was soon declared, leading to a final treaty between Mexico and the United States which recognized the border of the Adams-Onís Treaty. Florida became a safer haven for Native Americans who were being pushed south from the expanding northern colonies, as well as for runaway slaves escaping servitude, which led to the Seminole Wars. On January 10, 1861, Florida became the third state to secede and join the Confederacy. However, until Dr. John Gorrie’s invention of air conditioning, in Apalachicola, Florida was forgotten.
Stephen Valdes is a retired director for Johnson & Johnson International who joined the Military Heritage Museum in Punta Gorda six years ago and acts as the museum’s Media Historian. He spent twelve years in the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama, in the education department. Mr. Valdes served as an instructor for the United States Army on Soviet Studies and related military doctrine, developing the core curriculum for Soviet practices and theory for the Fort Jackson Military Police School. For the past twelve years, he has been an Adjunct Professor of business and economics at Polytechnic University, a civil engineering university. His family has deep ties to Florida, as he is a fourth-generation Floridian and his wife’s family first settled here in 1825.
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