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Exhibition Reviews
Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. 1 South Castillo Dr., St. Augustine, FL 32084.
Permanent exhibition, last renovated 1992. Su–Sa 8:45–4:45; closed Christmas. Adults $5, children 6–16 $2, children 5 and under free. Fort and 20 acres. Gordon Wilson, site manager.
Self-guided map, official map and guide (with political history), pamphlets on Don Manuel de Cendoya (governor of Florida 1669–1673), Apache Indians, Plains Indians, Seminole Indians, Hispanics in the Civil War.
Castillo de San Marcos: A Guide to Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, Florida. By the National Park Service. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994. 66 pp. Paper, $4.95, ISBN 0-16-061662-X.)
Internet: contact and visit planning information, operational facts, a historical resource study (1997), bookstore, employment and volunteer opportunities, maps, nearby attractions, and weather and permit information; also an in-depth site with history, virtual tour, photo gallery, event schedule, educational materials, news, and related links <http://www.nps.gov/casa/index.htm> (Dec. 12, 2003).
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| At the heart of St. Augustine's heritage industry lies the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. This seventeenth-century bastion, built to protect the city, is a palimpsest for over three centuries of Florida history—from sixteenth-century Spanish settlement to nineteenth-century Indian wars. Judiciously abridging this long narrative, the exhibition emphasizes the presidio's Spanish origins and, despite some flaws, successfully incorporates the stories of subsequent occupants to show how several cultures have shaped the Castillo's history. |
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The exhibit unfolds in a self-guided tour through the storage rooms surrounding the Castillo's courtyard. The first stop projects visitors into the world of seventeenth-century Spanish soldiers through a reproduction of the fort's guard quarters. The installation illustrates quotidian life at the Castillo and utilizes three-hundred-year-old text and drawings on the walls to characterize colonial St. Augustine. Visitors continue by moving on to the Flag Room. A timeline on the east wall offers the details of a point already made by the six flags hanging above: the Castillo has a checkered political history, held by Spain twice, England, the United States twice, and the Confederacy. The coat of arms of St. Augustine's founder, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, sits at the room's focal point, accompanied by a description of the establishment of America's oldest permanent European settlement in 1565. A connected room recounts the circumstances of the Castillo's construction starting in 1672, explains how locally quarried coquina made its location possible, and specifies the utility of its bastion design. Masonry ingredients and a touchable block of coquina, along with concise descriptions and pared-down diagrams of their integration into the surrounding walls, show as much as they tell about the Castillo's architectural heritage. |
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The next room is nearly bare except for a color-coded panel outlining Atlantic trade routes. The emptiness invites visitors to imagine the provisions stockpiled here to safeguard Spanish colonists. But this room neglects to tell the story of its later occupants adequately. Twenty Native Americans escaped from here during the second Seminole war in 1837. A pamphlet available at the Castillo's entrance describes the escape but fails to connect it to a location. Only visitors on one of the well-executed park ranger tours learn of this significant layer in the room's white space. An unobtrusive marker would add cohesion to the events overlapping in this room and utilize a powerful and only partially realized opportunity to reveal the historical irony of how the same walls sustained one people and deprived another. |
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