In 1738, the governor of Spanish Florida, Manuel de Montiano, had the fort established as a free black settlement, the first to be legally sanctioned in what would become the territory of the United States.

Fort Mose Historic State Park, which now includes a visitors' center and small museum, is located on the edge of a salt marsh on the western side of the waterway separating the mainland from the coastal barrier islands.

One particular place of interest was St. Augustine, where the Spanish had established Mission Nombre de Dios with the help of Afro-Spanish slaves and settlers in the late 16th century.

In 1693, King Charles II of Spain issued a royal decree proclaiming that runaways would be granted asylum in Florida in return for converting to Catholicism, which required baptism with Christian names, and serving for four years in the colonial militia.

The military leader at the fort, who had since 1726 been the appointed captain of the free black militia at St. Augustine,[12] was a Mandinga born in the Gambia region of Africa, and baptized as Francisco Menéndez.

He had been captured by slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to the colony of Carolina,[13] from where, he, like many other black enslaved persons, escaped and sought refuge in Spanish Florida.

His status as a leader was solidified with the Spanish colonial authorities when he helped defend the city from a British attack led by John Palmer in 1728, and distinguished himself by his bravery.

Analysis of faunal remains found at the site by the team zooarchaeologist Elizabeth Reitz indicated that the Mose villagers had a diet very similar to that of the nearby Indian communities, with a heavy dependence on marine proteins and wild foods.

[16] Further north, a similar rebellion was alleged by British colonists against enslaved Africans in the New York Conspiracy of 1741, which led to the public execution of several accused civilians.

Most of its inhabitants came originally from numerous different tribal and cultural groups in West Africa (predominately Kongos, Carabalis, and Mandinka) and had been sold into slavery in the colonies of North and South Carolina.

By successfully defending their freedom and Spanish Florida in the mid-18th century, the black inhabitants of Fort Mose had a significant role in contemporary political conflicts between European colonial powers in the southeast.

The black militia fought beside Spanish regular soldiers against British forces under James Oglethorpe, who launched an attack on St. Augustine in 1740 during the War of Jenkins' Ear.

By 1752, the Spanish had returned to and rebuilt Fort Mose, and the new governor forcibly relocated most of the free blacks back into the defensive settlement, from the more cosmopolitan, multilingual culture of St.

They found a wide assortment of artifacts: military paraphernalia such as gunflints, lead shot, metal buckles and hardware; household items such as pipestems, thimbles, nails, ceramics, and bottle glass;[31] and food remnants such as burnt seeds and bone.

Led by Lori Lee, James Davidson, Elizabeth Ibarrola, and Chuck Meide, these excavations are unique in that they have been conducted both on land and underwater in the surrounding creeks, resulting in a wide variety of domestic and military artifacts and food remains from the 1752-1763 Black militia along with other periods of occupation.

The construction of a replica open to visitors to the park has been a goal of the Fort Mose Historical Society since the mid-1990s, though the project did not move forward in earnest until the early 2020s when major donations and grants secured the necessary funding, estimated at around $3 million.