The Old Country
1817
The Arrendondo Grant
With the British gone, Spain did little to resettle, much less, protect Florida, leaving much of the territory depopulated and unguarded. This allowed for a constant flow of escaped slaves from Georgia and the north to flee to Florida where they joined with the native Seminoles who were flourishing in the Alachua Savana area.
Spain’s tenuous grip on Florida was slipping away. To encourage settlement and increased control, Spain in 1817 granted large tracks of land to “friends” of the Crown. While stated intent was to encourage settlement, it was also seen as a land grab by individuals to secure as much land as possible before what was seen as a likely turn of Florida to the Americans. The grants were scattered about Florida in what would be considered prime land, Amelia Island, Flemming Island, Ormand Beach, and were often considerable in size, ten to sixty thousand acres. But there was one grant that was one the largest of the grants and of most importance to my story, the two-hundred-eighty-nine thousand (289,000) acre Arrendondo Grant.
1823 map of Central Florida with Arrendondo Grant highlighted.
Click on map for larger view
On December 22nd, 1817, (which happens to be my birthday, the day, not the year), the King of Spain granted Don Fernando De la Maza Arrendondo and his son 289,645 acres of land described as being, “Four Leagues of Land to each Wind” from “the Sink”, being the Alachua Sink, on the Alachua Savana that William Bartram visited back in 1734. In addition to the Arrendondo grant, eleven smaller land grants were made which would later become Marion County.
The Spanish pretty much left the Seminoles in central Florida to themselves, partly due to lack of military presence, but perhaps by intent, for the Seminoles defended their territory keeping white settlers from the north from the land, it was like the Spanish had their own private army to keep others at bay, although they were a bit unruly and at times out of control. Regardless, at the time of the Arrendondo Grant, there was the stipulation that the settlement of the grant could not violate Seminole rights. Of course, there was the fact that no Spaniard would cross the St. John’s River above Buena Vista due to the natives.
A second stipulation of the grant was that there had to be three hundred settlers on the land by the end of three years. This presented a problem when you had to get permission from the Seminoles who were not too friendly. It took two years for Don Fernando to find someone to find someone to settle the grant when in 1821 Don Fernando engaged two “Proprietors” for initial settlement, Horatio S. Dexter and Edward M. Wanton, who were to establish friendly relations with the Indians to permit settlement in their territory.