Tallahassee, Florida: A New Capital Named "Old Town"

In 1823, the men picking a site for Florida’s capital rode past two Tallahassees, an old Indian town and a new one, and the capital took the name. The word is usually translated as “old town,” which makes it a funny fit for a city that was brand new.

A capital somewhere in the middle

In the early 1820s, territorial Florida wanted a permanent seat of government. An act of its Legislative Council called for two commissioners, one from East Florida and one from West Florida, to meet at St. Marks and explore the country between the Ochlockonee and Suwannee rivers for “the most eligible and convenient situation for the seat of Government.”

The two men were Dr. W. H. Simmons, who had business waiting in St. Augustine, and John Lee Williams, who set sail from Pensacola in an open boat on September 30, 1823. Both kept journals, and the Florida Historical Society printed them in 1908. That’s lucky for you and me, because they describe the place right before it became a capital.

The old town and the new one

On October 28, 1823, Williams rode up to what he called “the new Tallahassee village.” A man in a nut patch “very sternly demanded what I wanted and said he was Neomathla,” the chief. Williams told him the governor wanted a spot near the center of the territory, since “the distance to St. Augustine was so great.” Neamathla, as Simmons spelled it, was not happy, but he let them go on.

Simmons wrote that they then “passed to the old Tallahassee town, where Chifixico, chief of the settlement, evinced an equal opposition.” Chifixico “angrily caught up a handful of dirt, and presenting it asked if that was not his land.” Williams described the old village the next morning: few huts, but extensive fields “covered with large peach trees.”

Old fields, new capital

The commissioners liked what they saw. Caroline Mays Brevard’s 1919 school history of Florida says they settled on “the old fields which had been abandoned by the Tallahassee Indians at the time of Jackson’s raid on the Fowl towns.” The journals complicate that a little, since both chiefs were still living close by in 1823. Brevard then adds: “The next year the new capital was surveyed, and the musical name, Tallahassee, was given to it.” That was 1824. None of the sources we read says who actually picked the name.

What “Tallahassee” means

Henry Gannett’s federal list of place names calls Tallahassee a Seminole word meaning “old town,” and says, in the words of his 1902 edition, that the city got the name “because it is supposed to have been the site of Indian cornfields in remote times.”

Albert S. Gatschet, whose 1884 study of the Creek people includes long notes on their language, gives nearly the same thing: “Tallahassie, or ‘Old City.’” When he takes apart another Creek town name that ends the same way, Pakan’-Talahassi, he gets italua, “town,” and hassi, “ancient,” which he says is meant “in the sense of waste.” You’ll find the same ending on other Creek towns in his book, like Kawita Talahassi, which he translates as “old Kawita Town.” So the two translations, “old town” and “old city,” point the same way.

That leaves a small irony. Florida’s government needed a brand-new town in 1824, and it named it after an old one.

Sources & further reading

• Journals of W. H. Simmons and John Lee Williams, Publications of the Florida Historical Society, vol. 1 (April and July 1908). The 1823 act, the trip from Pensacola, Neamathla at “the new Tallahassee village,” Chifixico at “the old Tallahassee town” and the peach orchards.
• Caroline Mays Brevard, A History of Florida (1919), pp. 108–110. The commissioners’ choice of the Tallahassee old fields and the naming of the capital, surveyed in 1824.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905, p. 296; 1902 edition). “Old town,” and the supposed Indian cornfields.
• Albert S. Gatschet, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, vol. 1 (1884). “Tallahassie, or ‘Old City’” (p. 72); Kawita Talahassi (p. 135); italua, “town,” and hassi, “ancient,” in Pakan’-Talahassi (p. 142).
• GNIS feature 308416 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record, which lists Tallahassee as the capital of Florida.