Prospect Bluff Historic Sites (until 2016 known as Fort Gadsden Historic Site, and sometimes written as Fort Gadsden Historic Memorial) is located in Franklin County, Florida, on the Apalachicola River, SW of Sumatra, Florida. The site contains the ruins of two forts.
The earlier and larger one was built by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812. They allowed the members of the disbanded Corps of Colonial Marines, made up largely of fugitive slaves, and Creek tribesmen to occupy it after the British evacuated Florida in 1815, deliberately leaving their munitions behind. At that point, since the British had not named it, Americans started referring to it as Negro Fort. It was destroyed in a river attack from U.S. forces in 1816.
Fort Gadsden was built in 1818 within the former walls of the former Negro Fort.
The site has been known by several other names at various times, including Prospect Bluff, British post,Life of Andrew Jackson. James Parton, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1880. p. 393. Nicholls' Fort, Blount's Fort, Fort Blount, African Fort, and Fort Apalachicola. The local natives called the land Achackwheithle.
Listed in the National Register of Historic Places and named a National Historic Landmark in 1972, the Prospect Bluff Historic Sites was acquired by the Apalachicola National Forest in 1940 and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service.British Fort at National Historic Landmarks Program The process of memorializing the site began in 1961, when the Apalachicola National Forest issued the State of Florida a term special use permit for an area of approximately including the site to be run as a state park. Administration of the site reverted to the federal government in the 1990s. The site contains interpretive signage, picnic area with pavilion, and rest rooms.
Prospect Bluff The site of both Negro Fort and the later Fort Gadsden was Prospect Bluff, "a fine bluff overlooking the Apalachicola River," whose modest elevation of and the swamp that almost surrounded it (description below) gave it a natural military strength. The name parallels the Spanish one, Loma de Buena Vista, literally "hill with a good view".
Accessible only by river then, the site was and is still remote. The river was the boundary between East Florida and West Florida during the British Florida period (1763–1783) and the second Spanish Florida period (1783–1821). By modern land route it is from Pensacola and from St. Augustine. The area was sparsely populated, and in the twentieth century a large portion became the Apalachicola National Forest. The river was of intense interest to the British, who saw it as an undefended entry into the United States through Georgia. It was of no interest to the Spaniards; it led nowhere they cared about. Spanish forces in Florida were limited and Spain was far less committed to Florida than it was to its other colonies, most of them much more productive. Spain's inability to police its borders or return fugitive slaves was central to Florida's transfer to the United States in 1821.
Control of Prospect Bluff meant control of the river, which had served as a transportation artery for centuries. More recently, it had enabled raiding parties to go upriver into Georgia and the Mississippi Territory via the Chattahoochee and especially the Flint River. The attacks were made on plantations, which had few if any defenses. These parties, besides coming back with material goods, saw to it that the slaves of the raided plantations could get free. This was a great economic blow to the slave owners (slaves were expensive), and an ideological affront as well, leaving them insecure and angry.
Prospect Bluff was valuable militarily not only because of the elevation its name suggests, but because it was at a "strategic location", a bend in the river, giving an important sight advantage over any boat.
Before 1814 The Florida panhandle was mostly wilderness before 1814. Its population at the time is unknown, except for isolated reports. As in the rest of Florida, there were many Native American refugees from the United States, who merged into a new ethnicity, Seminoles. It provided excellent cover for escaped slaves, who, since they shared a common enemy, got along with the Seminoles fairly well; "over time, a bond developed between escaped Africans and the Seminoles that only increased with time and white pressure for their return". Some became black Seminoles. There was "reciprocal respect and affection"; the former slaves, who knew English, served as interpreters. This predecessor of the Underground Railroad ran south. The biggest issue about the area discussed by whites was how to get escaped slaves back, or get compensation for them, and prevent or reduce future escapes. The return of Native Americans was unwanted, and they were soon forcibly removed from Florida as well.
As was customary in pre-railroad times, settlement took place first along rivers. The name Apalachicola River derives its name from Apalachicola Province on what is now the Chattahoochee River (the Spanish regarded what is now the Chattahoochee as part of the Apalachicola River). Settlement at Prospect Bluff by maroons (escaped slaves and their descendants), Seminoles, and a few Europeans is documented at the end of the eighteenth century.
In January 1783 a conference was held in St. Augustine between the representatives of the British Crown—Governor Patrick Tonyn, Brigadier General Archibald McArthur, and Thomas Brown, the superintendent of Indian affairs—and the head men and principal warriors of the towns of the Upper and the Lower Creeks, who complained of the long distance they must travel to the stores from which they obtained their supplies. The Indians offered protection to merchants who would move their stores to locations closer to their territory, and pointed out the Apalachicola River as a suitable place for a trading house. The Creeks said it was not only more convenient for themselves, but also much nearer to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Indians, and requested that the house of Panton, Leslie & Company, who had been supplying them with goods, should be solicited to settle there for that purpose.
William Panton was present at the conference, and agreed with the Indians to establish a store at such a place as he or his co-partners might find suitable between the forks of Flint river and the mouth of the Apalachicola River, provided that letters of license were issued to him and his partners. The agreement was confirmed by the Crown, and the traders were granted the necessary license. Their store opened in 1784, by which time Spain had regained possession of Florida, at Fort San Marcos de Apalache (modern St. Marks, Florida). This store was attacked and looted by the adventurer William Augustus Bowles in 1792 and again in 1800, at which point it ceased operations.
A trading post run by John Forbes and Company, successors to Panton, Leslie & Company, was set up in 1804 at the more defensible Prospect Bluff at the request of "Indians" ("Mickosuckees" is the only ethnicity mentioned). It was "manned by Edmund Doyle with some assistance from William Hambly, an Indian trader with years of experience in the area." Doyle and Hambly "each owned plantations higher up the river, at Spanish Bluff on the west bank and near present-day Bristol on the east bank."
The site of the trading post was inside the walls of the Fort, built around it; this explains why the precise site has never been identified. It included a building for storing hides (what the Native Americans had to trade), quarters for negro slaves, and a cow pen for several hundred cattle that were raised nearby. During the War of 1812, British troops ransacked the store and freed the slaves.
Figures on the number of maroons who settled in the surrounding area range from 300 to 1,000. The blacks developed plantations extending up to 50 miles along the river. A report from 1812 mentions over 36 cleared acres and 1,200 cattle, and they lived in "large and well-built cabins". Their crops were peas, beans, corn, and rice.
British Post (1814–15) Construction of the fort began in May 1814, when the British seized the trading post of John Forbes and Company.
The British launched an invasion of Pensacola during the War of 1812 and occupied it until General Andrew Jackson took the town on November 7, 1814. The British forces, over 100 officers and men led by a Brevet Captain of the Royal Marines, George Woodbine, made camp at the only community between Pensacola and St. Marks: the trading post of John Forbes and Company, surrounded by negro plantations.
It was located at Prospect Bluff. Woodbine began to train local Native Americans as well as escaped slaves. Nicolls recruited the ex-slaves into the new (black) Corps of Colonial Marines. They were well-armed, well-equipped, and underwent drills; many had been in training for months. He also assembled and trained more than five hundred Creek and Seminole Indians by February 1815, but they came from a different culture, did not like being trained, and did not have the incentive of being protected from American re-enslavement. Nicolls found the ex-slaves superior as soldiers, reporting that his black recruits had enlisted "with the strictest good faith and conduct, so much so, that out of 1,500 of them I never had occasion to punish one of them". He added that in contrast with British soldiers, "they would not get drunk".
They were preparing to attack Georgia when news arrived of the end of the war. With the offensive cancelled, a meeting was held on March 10 resulting in the Treaty of Nicolls' Outpost. Nicolls and his men then returned to Prospect Bluff. The British paid off the Colonial Marines in April, in the presence of a Spanish army officer, Vicente Sebastián Pintado, seeking to reclaim the fugitives from Spanish Florida, and withdrew most of their force to Bermuda, with Pintado departing with HMS Cydnus, in transit to Pensacola.Vicente Sebastián Pintado to José de Soto, April 29, 1815, Vicente Sebastián Pintado Papers, box 3, folder 1, Library of Congress, microfilm, PKY On May 16, 1815, the British evacuated the last of the garrison there. At the time of his departure in May 1815, Nicolls promised his allies to return in six months, according to Hawkins.
Blacks and Native Americans under Nicolls' direction built two forts on the Apalachicola River. The larger and more important one was to be on the border of Georgia, at the juncture of the Flint and the Chattahoochee Rivers, in modern Chattahoochee, Florida, and was to serve as the base for a U.S. invasion. Time only permitted the construction of a small wooden structure, which Nicolls called Fort Apalachicola, but is today referred to as Nicolls' Outpost.