San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park in Wakulla County, Florida

Photograph: San Marcos de Apalache SP fort site01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Wakulla County attraction

San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park

Wakulla County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

Fifteen acres at 148 Old Fort Road, on the point where the Wakulla River runs into the St. Marks.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Five flags have flown over this ground. The Spanish put up a wooden stockade here and called it San Marcos de Apalache. Another wooden fort went up around 1753 and a hurricane took it down. Work on a stone fort began in 1759, and after that the place changed hands again and again, held by the Spanish, the British, the Spanish once more, the Americans and finally the Confederates. Andrew Jackson raided this area during the First Seminole War and seized the fort in 1818; the executions of Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister, which nearly caused a war with Britain, happened here that April. After Florida seceded the Confederate army took the site and renamed it Fort Ward, and United States forces took it back in 1865. In 1859 the federal government built a marine hospital here out of stone pulled from the old fort, and the museum and visitor center now stand on that hospital's foundation. It went on the National Register on November 13, 1966. A short trail runs out to the point

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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