Locating Tallahassee
Robert Butler
Orginal Survey, Land Records, Bureau of Land Management, LABINS
1824 Survey Map of Township 1-North, Range 1-West with Section 36 in the
lower righ,t or southeast, corner of the Township
with Tallahassee highlighted, in the southeast corner of Section 36. Shown
in yellow are the East-West and North-South
Meridians upon
which the grid for all other Townships and land surveys are based
Simmons and Williams filed their report on the 24th of May, 1824 and the law titled, “An Act providing for a grant of land for the seat of government in the Territory of Florida, and for other purposes," was approved. From Simmons and Williams recommendation the site would be near the old Tallahassee. The act called for, "One entire section of land or fractional section not exceeding in quantity one-quarter section.” The referred to “section” being part of the Rectangular Survey System [link] that was in place at the time. A section contains approximately 640 acres. In addition, the Act allowed for the government to sell a quarter of the section, "for the purpose of raising a fund for the erection of public buildings at said seat of government.” The act also reserved land, "lying contiguous to, and adjoining the quarter section granted by the first section of this Act, to be located by the Governor of said Territory.”
There was a problem though, it wasn’t exactly clear as to where the land was for it had not been surveyed so in May of 1824 President James Monroe appointed Col. Robert Butler, of Tennessee, as Surveyor General of Florida and instructed to proceed without delay to begin the survey with instructions that the southeast corner of the quarter section for the permanent seat of government was to be “fixed as the point from which the principle meridian and parallel shall run.” Basically this was the base point for which all other land surveys were based. Robert Butler played an import role in the formation of Florida serving as Surveyor General until he retired in 1842.
It took some time to establish the exact location, but with the survey done, on February 16, 1825, George Walton in a letter to the Commissioner of the General Land Office defined Tallahassee as being,
situated on the southeast quarter of section No. 36, township 1, range 1 north and west; which is bounded on the north by the northeast quarter of said section, on the east by the southwest quarter of section 31, in township 1, range 1 north and east, and on the south by the northeast quarter of section No. 1, in town- ship 1, range 1 south and west of the base parallel and meridian.
In 1824, the third Florida Legislative session met in Tallahassee for the first time in a crude log building serving as the capitol building.
The 1824 United States Congress authorized the construction of the first federal road in Florida to connect St. Augustine to Pensacola passing through Tallahassee in the middle. Contract to build the road was awarded to John Bellamy who completed construction in 1826 and for the first time one could travel between the cities in a matter of days.
Comming soon... Robert Butler Surveyor of Florida
Updated: 2026-09-07