Cascades Park (Tallahassee)
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Cascades Park
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New park in 2015
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| Location | Tallahassee, Florida |
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| Coordinates | 30°26′8″N 84°16′38″W / 30.43556°N 84.27722°WCoordinates: 30°26′8″N 84°16′38″W / 30.43556°N 84.27722°W |
| NRHP Reference # | 71000239 |
| Added to NRHP | May 12, 1971 |
Cascades Park is a 24-acre (97,000 m2) park along the stream known as the St. Augustine Branch in Tallahassee, Florida, south of the Florida State Capitol. It is a Nationally Registered Historic Place because it influenced the territorial government's choice of the capital city's location. It also contains Florida's Prime meridian marker monument which is the foundation point for most land mapping throughout Florida.
The park as conceived in 1971 had a stream and shallow waterfalls but it closed because of soil contamination and toxic waste left buried by the gasification plant that once occupied the site. It was cleaned up with Department of Environmental Protection funding in 2006 and construction on the new park was initiated in 2010 using money from the penny sales tax. The newly designed Cascades Park opened in 2014. Features of the new park include the Capital City Amphitheater, a fountain with light, music, splash pads, and ponds, and boulder climbing, beachscape and outdoor classroom area known as Discovery at Cascade Park that was privately funded.
In 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States. A territorial government was established, but the two largest cities, Pensacola and St. Augustine, were too far west and east, respectively, for either to make a good permanent capital. Territorial governor William Pope Duval appointed two commissioners, one from Pensacola and one from St. Augustine, to choose a location roughly halfway between them to build the new capital. When they saw a beautiful waterfall in what is now Cascades Park, they chose a nearby hill as the location for the future city of Tallahassee.
John Lee Williams, the commissioner from Pensacola, wrote of the waterfall:
Doct. Simmons has agreed that the site should be fixed near the old fields abandoned by the Indians after Jackson’s invasion, but has not yet determined whether between the... old fields, or on a fine high lawn about a mile W. In both spots, the water is plenty and good....Directly east of the old fields runs a...stream of water which you must recollect. This stream, after running about a mile south, pitches about 20 or 30 feet (9.1 m) into an immense chasm, in which it runs 60 or 70 rods to the base of a high hill which it enters among clefts of Amorphous argilaceous...rocks full of shells and other fossils.
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Wikipedia