1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Tallahassee

TALLAHASSEE, the capital of Florida, U.S.A., and the county seat of Leon county, in the W. part of the state, about 40 m. E. of the Apalachicola river and 20 m. from the Gulf of Mexico, about midway by railway between Jacksonville and Pensacola. Pop. (1900) 2981 (1755 negroes); (1910) 5018; in 1900 the population of the county was 19,887, of whom 16,000 were negroes. Tallahassee is served by the Seaboard Air Line and the Georgia, Florida & Alabama railways. The city is finely situated on a hill, about 300 ft. above sea-level, and the streets are wide and well-shaded. The principal buildings are the State Capitol, Grecian in architecture, the Federal Building, and the County Court House. In the Episcopal cemetery two monuments mark the graves of Charles Louis Napoléon Achille Murat (1801-1847), the eldest son of Joachim Murat, and of his wife Catherine (1803-1867), the daughter of Col. Bird C. Willis of Virginia and a grand-niece of George Washington.^[1] Tallahassee is the seat of the Florida Female College, co-ordinate with the State University for men, and the State Normal and Industrial School (for negroes), an agricultural and mechanical college. About 17 m. S. of Tallahassee, in Wakulla county, is the Wakulla Spring, about 106 ft. deep, one of the largest of the remarkable springs of Florida.

Tallahassee's name is of Seminole origin, and means, it is said, “tribal land.” During a war with the Apalachee Indians in 1638 the Spaniards, according to tradition, fortified a hill W. of the city, where the Fort St Luis Place, a plantation mansion, now stands. About 1818 most of the Indians were expelled from the vicinity, and a settlement was made by the whites. In 1824 Tallahassee, then virtually uninhabited, was formally chosen by the United States Government as the capital of the Territory of Florida, and it continued as the capital after the admission of Florida into the Union as a state in 1845. It was a residential centre for well-to-do planters before the Civil War, and Bellair, 6 m. S., now in ruins, was a fashionable pleasure resort. On the 10th of January 1861 a state convention adopted at Tallahassee an Ordinance of Secession.

1. Murat settled here about 1821, became a naturalized American citizen, relinquishing his claim to the crown of Naples, and lived here for much of the time until his death, holding successively the office of alderman, mayor and postmaster of the city, and devoting some of his leisure to the preparation of three books, describing political and social conditions in America, the last of which, Exposition des principes du gouvernement républicain tel qu'il a été perfectionné en Amérique (1838), was translated into many languages and was very popular in Europe. After his death his wife lived in what is still known as the Murat Homestead, about 2 m. W. of Tallahassee, and after the American Civil War she received an annuity of 30,000 francs from Napoleon III.