St Augustine
The oldest city in the United States is Spanish
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Huguenots were French Protestants, persecuted at home, and some of them tried to found a refuge in Florida. The town was founded to expel a French Huguenot colony, which places the first American battlefield of Europe's wars of religion here. Fort Mose outside the town became, in 1738, the first free Black settlement in what is now the United States: Spain offered freedom to enslaved people who fled British colonies and accepted baptism. It was a strategy against a rival rather than a declaration of principle — but it worked, and the escape route south is a part of the story rarely told.
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The Spanish founded St Augustine in Florida in 1565 — over forty years before Jamestown. It is the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the United States.
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