How Tallahassee Was Founded, 1824 to 1845

Official sources give two founding years: Leon County says Tallahassee was established in 1824 (Leon County), while the City of Tallahassee says the city was established in 1825 (City of Tallahassee).

The two years mark different steps. A state historical marker says that after the capital site was picked, the land was surveyed and the town incorporated shortly thereafter (state marker), and the city’s timeline puts the first land survey of the area in 1824 (City of Tallahassee). Another state marker says Tallahassee’s first newspaper, the Florida Intelligencer, was founded on February 19, 1825, nine months before the city was incorporated (state marker). No source fetched for this page prints the incorporation day itself.

Sources for the table: City of Tallahassee; state markers; Florida Department of State; Florida Historic Capitol Museum.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rereading the city planning office’s area history timeline, Leon County’s statistics box, the ten Leon County entries this page cites from the state historical marker list and the two state Capitol history pages for the 1826, 1839 and 1845 building dates.

The city planning office says Tallahassee is named for the “old fields” it once encompassed, a name the area earned from the Apalachee who lived there (City of Tallahassee).

The same page passes on a legend that the final spelling was chosen by Octavia Walton, daughter of the territorial governor of Florida, and presents it as legend (City of Tallahassee). It adds that Tallahassee shows the influence of the Apalachee and of the Spanish, French and English who held the area in succession, and its timeline runs from Apalachee villages through Spanish missions, British rule from 1763 and the transfer of Florida to the United States in 1819 (City of Tallahassee).

A state marker on the Capitol grounds describes the founders choosing “the old Indian village, Tallahassee” after exploring the area around St. Marks (state marker).

Leon County dates from December 29, 1824, when the Territorial Legislature made it Florida’s seventh county; the city planning office’s timeline names Tallahassee as both its county seat and the capital that year (City of Tallahassee).

The sources differ on what the county was carved from. The city says Leon was originally part of both Escambia County and Jackson County and later part of Gadsden County (City of Tallahassee), while the state marker in front of the County Courthouse at 301 South Monroe Street says it was originally part of Escambia and later Gadsden counties, without naming Jackson (Leon County marker).

The courthouse marker says Leon was named for Juan Ponce de Leon and became antebellum Florida’s most prosperous and populous county, with cotton thriving in its soil (Leon County marker), and that Tallahassee has been the state capital since 1824. Leon County today lists its area as 702 square miles and gives 1824 as its year of establishment (Leon County).

Two appointees from St. Augustine and Pensacola chose the Tallahassee site, after which the land was surveyed and the town incorporated (state marker).

The state marker on the Tallahassee Capitol grounds names them as Dr. William H. Simmons of St. Augustine and John Lee Williams of Pensacola, appointed to select a central location for a capital after William P. Duval succeeded Andrew Jackson as territorial governor in 1822 (state marker).

The state marker for the Capitol says the Capitol site was selected before Tallahassee was founded, that three log buildings housed the government in 1824, and that a wing of the permanent Capitol, financed by the sale of city lots, was built in 1826 and later torn down (Capitol marker).

At least one block in the new town was reserved for a congregation. The marker for Trinity United Methodist Church says Methodists formed Tallahassee’s first religious organization, meeting in the Myers home on September 28, 1824, with ten attendees, six white and four black; a city block at Bronough Street and Park Avenue was reserved for them, a wooden church went up there in 1825, and part of the 1826 ceremony for laying the Capitol cornerstone was held on that site (Trinity Methodist marker).

Within its first two decades the town gained a school, a cemetery, a bank, a railroad and a brick Capitol, each dated by a state or city source.

The first Leon Academy opened in 1827, three years after Tallahassee’s founding, and ran until the mid-1840s (Leon High School marker). The Florida Territorial Council set the present boundaries of the Old City Cemetery, between Call Street and Park Avenue, in 1829 (Old City Cemetery marker). Richard Keith Call, later the third and fifth territorial governor, bought the original 640 acres of The Grove in 1825 and built its two-story Greek Revival mansion between 1825 and 1832 using African-American slave labor (The Grove marker).

The Union Bank, created by the Territorial Council on February 13, 1833 and opened January 16, 1835, was capitalized at $1,000,000 and closed in 1843 (Union Bank marker). A second state marker calls it a planter’s bank from which plantation owners could borrow against their land and slave holdings, and dates the building differently: one marker says it was built circa 1830 for William Williams, the other that it was completed in 1841 after the bank had operated in a private house called The Columns (state markers).

The city lists the Tallahassee-St. Marks railroad as built in 1834 and “reported to be the third oldest railroad in the United States” (City of Tallahassee). On the Capitol, the Department of State records a $20,000 appropriation by Congress on March 3, 1839, the immediate razing of the old structure, and completion of the brick building in 1845 (Florida Department of State).

Tallahassee began at about one-quarter of a mile in size, by the city planning office’s count, and took roughly 150 years to reach 28.18 square miles in 1980 (City of Tallahassee).

Annexation added far more after that: the same page says about 75 square miles were added after 1980 through annexation, bringing the city to 103.37 square miles as of December 31, 2016 (City of Tallahassee). That figure is the newest the page gives, so any annexation after that date is not reflected in it.

The founding era ends with statehood in 1845. The Florida Historic Capitol Museum says the 1826 Capitol, never completely finished, was torn down in 1839 and replaced by the present structure, completed in 1845 just before Florida entered the Union as the 27th state (Florida Historic Capitol Museum). The Florida Department of State says that 1845 structure remains the core of the Old Capitol to the present day (Florida Department of State).