In recent decades, agencies charged with managing historic structures and sites have found dendroarchaeological studies increasingly valuable, given the ability of such studies to verify (or refute) accepted dates of construction. The Ximénez-Fatio House has well-documented historical and cultural significance for the state of Florida, as it is one of St. Augustine’s oldest, best-preserved, and most studied historic properties. According to documentary sources, the two-story coquina-stone main house was reportedly built around 1797–1798, and included a one-story wing of warehouses, giving the house a distinctive ‘‘L’’ shape. Documentary evidence also suggests that a second story was added above the wing sometime between 1830 and 1842. However, after studying the building fabric itself, historical architects now believe the entire wing of the house was remodeled two decades later in the 1850s. Our goals were to: (1) determine the probable construction years for the original house and wing using tree-ring dating techniques, and (2) verify the probable construction year for the remodeling that occurred in the wing section of the house. A total of 74 core samples were extracted from longleaf pine (Pinus palustris P. Miller) timbers used to construct the house. Twenty-six were confidently crossdated both visually and statistically against each other to produce a 185-year floating tree-ring chronology. A statistically significant (p < 0.0001) correlation between our chronology and a longleaf pine chronology from Lake Louise, Georgia, anchors our chronology between 1673 and 1857. No cutting dates were obtained from the main house, but the lack of any tree rings that post-date 1798 supports the 1797 construction date. Furthermore, cutting dates obtained from beams in the first-floor wing revealed that the extensive remodeling of the wing likely occurred in the period 1856 to 1858 soon after the house had been purchased by Louisa Fatio in 1855.

In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called St. Augustine, Florida, the most racist city in America. The resulting demonstrations and violence in the summer of 1964 only confirmed King’s characterization of the city. Yet, St. Augustine’s black history has its origins with the Spanish who founded the city in 1565. With little racial disturbance until the modern civil rights movement, why did St. Augustine erupt in the way it did? With the beginnings of Jim Crow in Florida around the turn of the century in 1900, St. Augustine’s black community began to resist the growing marginalization of their community. Within the confines of the predominantly black neighborhood known as Lincolnville, the black community carved out their own space with a culture, society and economy of its own. This paper explores how the African American community within St. Augustine developed a racial solidarity and identity facing a number of events within the state and nation. Two world wars placed the community’s sons on the front lines of battle but taught them to value of fighting for equality. The Great Depression forced African Americans across the South to rely upon one another in the face of rising racial violence. Florida’s racial violence cast a dark shadow over the history of the state and remained a formidable obstacle to overcome for African Americans in the fight for equal rights in the state. Although faced with few instances of violence against them, African Americans in St. Augustine remained fully aware of the violence others faced in Florida communities like Rosewood, Ocoee and Marianna. St. Augustine’s African American community faced these obstacles and learned to look inward for support and empowerment rather than outside. This paper examines the factors that vii encouraged this empowerment that translates into activism during the local civil rights movement of the 1960s.