HISTORY & HERITAGE
Fort Caroline National Memorial
Duval County · North Florida & First Coast
A full-size model of the French Huguenot fort of 1564, on the St. Johns River, marking a colony that lasted fifteen months.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere landed about 200 French settlers on the St. Johns River on June 22, 1564, and built Fort Caroline, named for King Charles IX. Most were Huguenots, Protestants leaving a France that was turning on them. The colony went hungry, leaned heavily on the Timucua for food and trade, and made an alliance with the chief Saturiwa that helped both sides for a while. Spain saw the fort as a trespass. Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived in 1565, founded St. Augustine on September 8, and marched overland through a hurricane to attack at dawn on September 20. The garrison was killed apart from about fifty women and children taken prisoner and a few men, Laudonniere among them, who got away. Jean Ribault's relief fleet was wrecked in the same storm and the survivors were executed at Matanzas Inlet, a name that means slaughters. In 1568 Dominique de Gourgues came back and burned the fort. Nobody has ever found the original site. The National Park Service created the memorial in 1953 near where Laudonniere is thought to have landed and put up a model of the fort, and the full-size version standing today shows how small and plain the real one was
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