ambitions increased, Spanish officials in Florida looked for ways to protect their settlements. In 1737, Manuel de Montiano became governor in St. Augustine; the next year he established a new town two miles north of the city called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. The name, according to Landers, was a composite of an existing Native American place name, Mose, with the addition of language commemorating its establishment by the Spanish Crown, Gracia Real, and the name of the town’ s patron saint, St. Teresa of Aviles.
Thus was born Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black community within the present boundaries of the United States.
The new town was established as a buffer against foreign encroachment, specifically the British to the north. According to later British reports, the fort was constructed of wood“ four square with a flanker at each corner, banked with earth, having a ditch without on all sides lined round with prickly royal and had a well and housing within a lookout.”
Fort Mose was soon put to the test in 1740 when tensions among Europe’ s Great Powers erupted into conflict.
With Britain and Spain at war, a force under British Gov. James Oglethorpe raided Florida and threatened St. Augustine- the battle of Bloody Mose. During the British
attack, Fort Mose was captured, but all its inhabitants reached the safety of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, as Governor Montiano ordered its evacuation prior to the battle. Oglethorpe’ s forces were eventually defeated, but Fort Mose was badly damaged in the battle and was abandoned for a dozen years.
In 1752, the fort was rebuilt and remained an active part of the defense of St. Augustine until 1763, when it was abandoned at the end of the Seven Years’ War between the Great Powers of Europe. In North America, it was known as the French and Indian War and was part of the struggle between France and Great Britain for colonial ascendency in the New World.
The reconstructed fort became part of a defensive perimeter built by the Spanish that extended from Mose southwest to a stockade on the banks of the San Sebastian River. The second fort was a three-sided structure equipped with two 4-pound canons and six swivel guns, according to a 1993 article in The Florida Anthropologist by Bruce Piatek, a former director of the Florida Agricultural Museum in Flagler County, and Carl D. Halbirt entitled“ The Stratigraphy of the Mose Line: St. Augustine’ s Last Line of Defense.” The unprotected side of the fort faced what is now called Robinson Creek.
The inhabitants of Fort Mose, along with the Spanish settlers in Florida, fled to Cuba, with many settling in
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