Fort San Carlos (Fernandina, Florida)

Fort San Carlos was a military structure built in 1816 to defend the Spanish colonial town of Fernandina, Florida, now called Old Town, which occupied a peninsula on the northern end of Amelia Island. The fort, a lunette fortification, stood on the southwest side of the town next to the harbor, on a bluff overlooking the Amelia River. It was made of wood and earthworks, backed with a wooden palisade on the east side, and armed with an eight or ten gun battery. Two blockhouses protected access by land on the south, while the village was surrounded with military pickets. An 1821 map of Fernandina shows that the street plan, laid out in 1811 in a grid pattern by the newly appointed Surveyor General of Spanish East Florida, George J. F. Clarke, today preserves nearly the same layout as that of 1821. The fort occupied the area bounded by the streets Calle de Estrada, Calle de White, and Calle de Someruelus. The structure itself has disappeared and only traces remain in what is now Fernandina Plaza Historic State Park.

The park contains the largest known undeveloped portion of the site of Spanish municipal and military activity on Amelia Island dating from the late 1780s. Archaeological investigations, starting in the early 1950s, revealed intermittent occupation and use of the area for as long as 4,000 years, beginning in the Orange period (2000–500 BC) and continuing to this day. A Spanish sentinel house was built in 1696 at the Timuqua village located there. Nearly all of Old Town was built on this Indian village and its shell heaps. In later colonial times the site gained military importance because of its deep harbor and its strategic location near the northern boundary of Spanish Florida.

The history of Fort San Carlos is intimately connected with the development of the Fernandina Plaza, also called the Town Lot, first defined in 1769 when a town site which included the lot was shown in charts drawn by Capt. John Fuller and then mapped by cartographer Thomas Jefferys in 1770. As late as 1777, however, there were no indications of any town development. The place had stood uninhabited, except for occasional encampments of English colonial invaders, since the raids in 1702 by Colonel James Moore, governor of South Carolina.

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