Florida’s Colonial Architectural Heritage by Elsbeth K. Gordon (review)

BOOK REVIEW Elsbeth K. Gordon, Floridas Colonia/Architectural Heritage. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2002, xxvi+319 pp., 9 maps, 32 color and 168 b/w illus., $39·95, ISBN o-8130-2463-3· E lsbeth Gordon's stated ambition in this comprehensive study of Florida's early architectural history is to "change the way Florida thinks of itself, and of its built environment " (r). What she has done in this impressive, well-illustrated and thoroughly researched volume , however, is to change the way all of us will think of"colonial architecture." For most architectural historians, those words inspire a quick visual image of New England framed saltboxes or Virginia Georgian brick mansions. But as Gordon points out, by the time the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, St. Augustine was already two hundred years old. It is only our prejudices about the thirteen colonies as somehow being the real United States, and the English heritage as the only one that matters, that has kept us from appreciating what happened in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. That Florida has a rich, long history is without doubt. Claimed in rsr3 by Spain, La Florida had over two centuries of building before the Treaty of Paris ceded it to England in q63. Twenty years later, after some impressive English building, it went back to Spain, and in r82r it finally became a territory of the United States. Gordon's aim is to tell the story of the cultural overlaying of native, African-Caribbean, Spanish and English building traditions and how they shaped a legacy that is still with us. Gordon accomplishes her goal in nine beautifully written chapters that trace Florida's building heritage from its pre-contact beginnings. Architecture did not start with Europeans, of course. The early explorers recorded impressive native buildings and whole city complexes as well as massive mounds such as the twenty-foot-high one called Mount Royal near Lake George that ARRIS BOOK REVIEW archaeologists think dates from 1050 to 1500. The awestruck English botanist-explorer William Bartram described it in 1774 as "a magnificent Indian mount" with a "noble Indian highway" three quarters of a mile long that led to a lake. The shell mound is still evident today (15). Most of Florida's early colonial architecture is not extant, however. None of the Indian villages or the early Spanish mission buildings survived. But in carefully reading early descriptions and official building records, and by scrutinizing the illustrations from the period, Gordon builds an impressive case for what had been there. Archaeology is also a significant tool, and the state of Florida has done more than most to rediscover its lost heritage. The reconstruction of Indian and Spanish buildings at Mission San Luis de Apalachee in Tallahassee is a case in point. Home to more than fourteen hundred people in the midseventeenth century, its impressive chief's house was a circular, conical-shaped building some 65 feet in diameter, and capable of holding three thousand people. It was reportedly created without any European tools or hardware. Earth-fast timbers tied together with vegetable and animal twine and covered with palm fronds were "built with as much perfection as those of the Spaniards," according to one 1630 traveler (42). While the Spanish followed their own building traditions and used labor from Mexico and Cuba, they also called on Indian builders to lend their expertise with thatch, matting and pole construction . Gordon argues that Florida's distinctive architectural forms grew out of this sort of borrowing as each group learned from the other what would and would not work in this new climate and adapted accordingly. Spain was interested in Florida, not for its resources, but for its strategic location as a place to help protect the ships carrying silver and gold home from Mexico and South America. It was the Franciscan missionaries who largely secured the territory, building first in wood and thatch. By the eighteenth century, however, the value and stability of local coquina stone was well understood and fashionable European-style buildings and town planning could be foundespecially in St. Augustine. Gordon devotes most of four chapters to that city, tracing its...