Saint Augustine Historical Society - Oldest House Museum Complex

06/15/2026

👉🏽Click here for the St. Augustine Historical Society’s America 250 Special Edition of El Escribano —
Florida’s American Genesis

🔗https://indd.adobe.com/view/318bc96c-61f0-48e0-b0e5-222493d0cc16

06/13/2026

IN THE NEWS! WJXT4 The Local Station / News4JAX visited the Oldest House at 14 St. Francis St., where Charles Tingley, Senior Research Librarian and Historian at the St. Augustine Historical Society, spent nearly two hours walking him through more than 450 years of history.

“There is layer upon layer of history here,” Tingley said.

From founding to fort
Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine on Sept. 8, 1565 — making it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States. By 1586, English privateer Sir Francis Drake had already attacked it. Through it all, the city held.

To protect Spain’s treasure fleets — which carried gold, silver and emeralds from the New World back to Europe along the Gulf Stream — Spain built the Castillo de San Marcos.

It remains the oldest masonry fort in the United States.
“Having a strong fortification kept Florida in Spanish hands,” Tingley said.
Funding the operation wasn’t what most people would expect, either.

“I bet you can’t possibly guess where the money came from that paid for all the soldiers and politicians here in St. Augustine,” Tingley said. “It was the taxes on the city of Puebla, Mexico.”

Flags, loyalists, a new nation
Florida changed hands not through battle, but through a bargain — traded from Spain to Britain in 1763 in exchange for Cuba. When the American Revolution began, loyalists poured in.

“The population of St. Augustine during the American Revolution swelled from 2,000 to about 10,000,” Tingley said.
Spain reclaimed Florida in 1784. The United States took possession in 1821 — and the layers of history kept building.

Nowhere else like it
Visitors feel it the moment they arrive.

For Tingley, that depth is more than visual — it’s literally underfoot.

In downtown St. Augustine, there is two to three feet of cultural deposit wherever you walk — layer after layer, strata after strata, of the physical evidence of people living on this site,” he said.

For more on St. Augustine’s history and Charles Tingley’s research: staughs.com

You can’t celebrate 250 years of American history without starting with the nation’s first city — St. Augustine, Florida.

06/12/2026

AMERICA 250 FEATURE! 🇬🇧 St. Augustine, Florida locations were featured this week on Fox 13 about the City’s history during the American Revolution!

Margo Pope, a member of The Woman’s Exchange of St. Augustine, was interviewed at the historic Peña-Peck House!

Maria Alvarez, a docent at the Oldest House Museum Complex, was also interviewed at the Gonzalez-Alvarez House.

HISTORY
In 1776, St. Augustine was the capital of British East Florida, acting as a crucial loyalist stronghold and military refuge rather than a participant in the American Revolution. After acquiring Florida from Spain in 1763, the British developed the city into a strategic hub for supplying the southern colonies and garrisoning troops.

British Governor Patrick Tonyn lived in the Peña-Peck House at 143 St. George Street in St. Augustine from 1778 to 1785. During this period, particularly between 1783 and 1785, the house served as the final seat of British government in East Florida after the American Revolutionary War.

📸 Video from Fox News Multimedia Reporters

06/10/2026

🗝️ 250 for the 250th 🇺🇸

📸 Guestroom key from the Hotel Ponce de Leon, 1887

The St. Augustine Historical Society is proud to participate in the Society of American Archivists 250 for the 250th, a national digital repository curated by the SAA that highlights stories and historical contributions from communities across the country.

Explore our contribution — and discover others from around the United States — by visiting the online exhibit here:
https://td52e01bc4f4b6253.starter1ua.preservica.com/portal/en-US

06/08/2026

🗝️Restoring the Llambias House Gardens: Preserving History, Protecting the Future

The St. Augustine Historical Society is excited to launch an initiative to restore the historic gardens of the Fernandez-Llambias House, a National Historic Landmark dating to St. Augustine’s First Spanish Period and one of St. Augustine’s most significant historic treasures.

For generations, the Llambias House has stood as a symbol of St. Augustine’s rich and diverse heritage. While the historic structure itself is in excellent condition following multiple restoration and preservation projects completed in recent years, the surrounding landscape has been repeatedly impacted by flooding, storm surge, and severe weather. Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, along with recurring flood events, damaged mature trees and historic plantings, reducing the gardens’ ability to manage stormwater and protect the site from future impacts effectively.

The Society has received an Opinion of Appropriateness from the City of St. Augustine Historic Architectural Review Board (HARB), allowing this important restoration project to move forward. The effort draws inspiration from the celebrated ornamental gardens established at the site by Catalina Usina Llambias and her family in the late nineteenth century. Historical accounts describe flower-lined pathways, shaded gathering spaces, and lush plantings that were admired throughout St. Augustine.

The goal is to restore the gardens as both a beautiful historic landscape and a resilient community asset. Planned improvements include new shade trees, native and adaptive plantings, enhanced walkways, and inviting spaces for visitors to gather and learn. Equally important, the project incorporates thoughtful flood mitigation and resilience strategies designed to improve stormwater absorption, reduce erosion, enhance drainage, and better withstand periodic flooding.

👉🏽To donate to the Llambias House Gardens Restoration Project here: https://staughs.com/donate/

Or send a check to:

St. Augustine Historical Society
Attn: Llambias House Gardens Restoration Project
271 Charlotte Street
St. Augustine, FL 32084

📸 Renderings created by Marquis Latimer & Halback

06/06/2026

D-DAY LETTER received in St. Augustine, Florida

Today we honor the anniversary of D-Day. On June 6th, 1944 the Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in Axis occupied France.

📝 A letter written from Joyce Murphy, to her mother, Deborah (Detta) Murphy, recounts her thoughts and feelings of the significant impact that June 6th, 1944 would have on her fellow Americans. The letter was originally published in the The St. Augustine Record on June 10, 1944.

TRANSCRIPT OF LETTER:
June 6, 1944
5 A.M.

Well, Moma:

I guess the above date will go down in history as one of the greatest days in the history of the United States. I can’t express my feelings at the moment. Here I am a small part of a great defense plant, doing my part to help get the supplies over seas. I am an American defense plant worker, listening to varied reports about the progress of the Allied forces in the battle to decide whether my little bit and the thousands of other contributions to this war effort was enough.

👉🏽Read and hear the rest of the letter in this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Rkybm_HdUT4

Today we honor the anniversary of D-Day. On June 6th, 1944 (76 year...

06/05/2026

The Gonzalez-Alvarez House is the oldest surviving Spanish colonial dwelling in St. Augustine!

The house dates back to the early 1700s, and its variety of architectural styles reflects the many changes in the occupation of St. Augustine.

Since 1918, the St. Augustine Historical Society has been its caretaker, and you probably know it as the Oldest House Museum Complex! It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

Tour the historic house at the Oldest House Museum Complex

📍14 St. Francis Street
St. Augustine, Florida
10 AM-5 PM
seven days a week
🔗staughs.com

06/03/2026

🪻🌸 The flowers are blooming on the grounds and gardens at the Oldest House Museum Complex!
Stroll the grounds and then tour the historic houses and museum exhibits.

📍14 St. Francis Street
St. Augustine, Florida
🔗staughs.com

06/01/2026

St. Augustine and Civil Rights: The Mass Arrest of Rabbis at the Monson Motor Lodge and the Pool Incident

BLOG POST: St. Augustine Historical Society
— Written by Robert Covert, Collections Manager and Editor-in-Chief

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the twentieth century saw a great deal of change, upheaval, and violence. At the national level, Black leaders like Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr. worked alongside local grassroots activists across the nation to bring about an end to segregation, discrimination, and institutionalized racism, relying often on non-violent civil disobedience.

Frequently, Black civil rights advocates were met with violence by white supremacists and anti-segregationists wherever they planned and carried out demonstrations. In the 1960s, the national Civil Rights Movement and its fight against white supremacy arrived in the nation’s Oldest City.

St. Augustine, as civil rights leaders saw it, was a typical strongly segregationist small southern town that relied on tourism dollars to survive. The city’s upcoming quadricentennial celebrations in 1965 and the planning leading up to them provided a perfect means to draw attention to segregation in the city and the South as a whole, displaying the violence that demonstrators were met with and hopefully spurring the passage of the national Civil Rights Act. St. Augustine ultimately proved pivotal in the greater struggle for Black Freedom in the 1960s and specifically in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for exactly this reason.

🗝️Read the full blog here: https://staughs.com/st-augustine-and-civil-rights-the-mass-arrest-of-rabbis-at-the-monson-motor-lodge-and-the-pool-incident/

05/29/2026

🗺️ Sir Frances Drake Burns St. Augustine on May 29, 1586

British Privateer Sir Francis Drake and 1,000+ men left St. Augustine after burning the settlement to the ground on this date. The raid was part of a much larger Anglo-Spanish War between England and Spain which spilled over into the new world. Although the city was destroyed and much of their supplies had been plundered by Drake’s forces, the people of St. Augustine were able to slowly rebuild with the help of the Spanish government, and eventually began construction on a permanent stone fort after subsequent attacks from others, now known as the Castillo de San Marcos.

The map from the raid is a hand-colored engraving by Baptista Boazio, dated 1589. It’s the oldest map of this area in the Florida state archives.

🗺️ View a copy of this map and other historic Florida maps in the Map Gallery at the Oldest House Museum Complex in St. Augustine, Florida

⏰ 10 AM-5 PM seven days a week
📍14 St. Francis Street
🔗staughs.com