St. Francis Barracks

When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine for the Spanish Crown, Jesuit priests were among the initial colonists to provide for the spiritual needs of the settlers and to help convert the native Timucua Indians to Christianity.

In the 1570s the Jesuits were replaced by friars of the Order of St. Francis who were allocated land in 1588 at the southern end of the city for their monastery and church, Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion (Our Lady of the Conception).

The Franciscan friars lived at the monastery until the British took possession of Florida in exchange for occupied Havana which they seized from the Spanish in the French and Indian War.

Almost the entire population of Catholic St. Augustine left the city upon the British taking control in 1763 including the Franciscan friars and many of their Native American converts.

The British, a large majority of whom were Protestant converted the friars former living quarters into military barracks for the troops stationed at the newly christened Fort St. Marks, the anglicized version of the Castillo de San Marco.

After signing the Treaty of Paris, the British who conceded defeat in the American Revolution agreed to relinquish control of the Florida Territory, restoring Spain's possession of the land.

In 1842, the U.S. Army soldiers who perished in the 1835 Dade Massacre in present-day Sumter County, Florida, were re-interred here under 3 coquina pyramid shaped monuments.

On January 7, 1861, before Florida's formal secession from the Union, members of a newly formed local militia unit named the St. Augustine Blues went to the St. Francis Barracks to demand the keys to the fort.