Lafayette's Land Grant and Tallahassee's French Connection

Two Frenchmen with American ties shaped the map of early Tallahassee, and only one of them ever lived here. The Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War general, received a full township of federal land on the east edge of the new capital in 1825 but never saw it. Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon, arrived in Tallahassee in 1825, married into a Virginia family and stayed for the rest of his life, according to a 2013 Tallahassee Democrat column by the late historian and columnist Gerald Ensley.

Lafayette's name went onto the town plan before the land grant was settled. The Florida Preservationist noted in its fall 2021 issue that the main east and west approach to the Capitol in the first town plan was named not for George Washington but for Lafayette, who was then on a tour of the United States lasting about 13 months across 24 states. The same original plan put Capitol Square between Monroe Street and Adams Street and named streets for Vice Presidents George Clinton and John Calhoun, which is how Calhoun Street got its name.

Frenchtown is the third piece, and the most argued over. For more than a century the neighborhood's name was explained as a leftover of French settlers sent by Lafayette. Research published in 2006 found no record of those settlers, and the origin of the Frenchtown name is now treated as an open question in Tallahassee history.

It was a reward from Congress for wartime service. Cornell University's Dean Lafayette Collection states that on July 4, 1825, the United States gave Lafayette 200,000 dollars and a tract of land in Florida as compensation for his role in the American Revolution, and that the collection holds a complete history of the Lafayette Township: maps, surveys, colonization plans (including the cultivation of grapes), sale agreements and correspondence with his agents George Graham and John Skinner and a sub-agent in Tallahassee.

Lafayette chose land beside the new capital. The Florida Preservationist describes the grant as a township of 36 square miles, about 23,000 acres, immediately adjacent to the original Tallahassee town site and starting on the east side of the state's prime meridian marker, the survey point for all of Florida. Ensley wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat that the grant stretched six miles east and north from the intersection of Meridian and Gaines streets. A plaque photographed in 2019 for University of North Florida Special Collections reads that by Act of Congress a township was granted to Lafayette in gratitude for his aid during the Revolutionary War.

The territorial government courted him. A 1904 school history reproduced by the University of South Florida Floripedia project records that in December 1825, at the request of the Legislative Council of Florida, Governor William Duval wrote to Lafayette inviting him to visit Florida or to make his home there. Lafayette never came; the closest he got on his tour, according to the Preservationist, was Macon, Georgia, and Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama. Today his name is on Lafayette Street and on Lafayette Heritage Trail Park, a Leon County trail system on Tallahassee's east side, where a shared-use trail runs around Piney Z Lake and connects to Tom Brown Park.

That was the story for generations. As Ensley summarized it, lore held that 50 to 60 Norman peasants came to Tallahassee in 1831 to grow grapes and silkworms on the Lafayette grant, gave up after two bad years, and that some moved to the Northern Addition of Tallahassee, which became Frenchtown. The 1904 school history on the Floripedia site repeats a version of it, saying Lafayette sent out a large number of his countrymen who settled in and near Tallahassee.

Author Julianne Hare went looking for proof while writing her 2006 book Historic Frenchtown and could not find it. According to the Democrat column, she found no record of a group of French peasants arriving at any Southern port, including nearby St. Marks, and no record of an overland party. In Leon County she found only three people with French names living on the Lafayette grant in the early 1830s. The 1830 census showed four French-named Tallahassee residents, all arrived in the 1820s, and the 1850 census, which listed birthplaces, showed nine people of French origin in Leon County, all of whom came to Tallahassee from other states.

Hare offered three other possible sources for the Frenchtown name: the War of 1812 engagement at Frenchtown, Michigan, which produced the rallying cry Remember Frenchtown; Frenchtown, New Jersey, a stronghold of the African Methodist Episcopal Church whose preachers founded AME churches in North Florida; and a carpenter named Jourdan Frenchy, who built many of the early Frenchtown houses. Retired Florida State history professor William Rogers told the Democrat it was a new interpretation, contrary to accepted wisdom. Frenchtown itself, centered on North Macomb Street, became the hub of Black life in Tallahassee before integration.

Ensley used the Frenchtown case to make a point about how Tallahassee history gets revised. He recalled that an older historical marker at Lake Jackson once claimed De Soto celebrated the first Christmas there, until the Lake Jackson mounds proved to be centuries older than De Soto and state archaeologist Calvin Jones found the real 1539 camp in 1987 on a hillside just east of the Capitol. Rogers told the paper that an original mistake is often handed down generationally, and that the work of checking it never ends.

Achille Murat was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and the son of General Joachim Murat, King of Naples. A state historical marker placed in 1969 says he settled in Florida in 1825 and served as an attorney, county judge and director of the Union Bank in Tallahassee. In 1826 he married Catherine Willis, a great-grandniece of George Washington, and the couple lived on plantations in neighboring Jefferson County, Ensley wrote; the marker names their plantations as Lipona and Econchatti.

Achille Murat died in 1847 and Catherine in 1867. Twin marble obelisks mark their graves in St. John's Episcopal Cemetery on Call Street in downtown Tallahassee, with the Murat seal on the surrounding wall, according to the marker. In December 2013 the Democrat reported that the Murat marker in the 400 block of East Call Street, erected in 1969 as the 11th historic marker in Leon County, had gone missing, and that the state learned of it on Dec. 16, 2013.

The 1904 history on the Floripedia site says Murat dropped the title of prince in Florida, was known as Colonel Murat and practiced law a little in Tallahassee. During the Second French Empire, the Belle Vue marker notes, Catherine was recognized as a princess and received financial help from Napoleon III.

The Murat marker story showed how fragile these signs are. Ensley reported that the state historic marker program began in 1960, that Leon County then had 36 state markers, and that state markers are overseen by the Florida Department of State but paid for by private sponsors. A replacement Murat marker was estimated at $2,130 in December 2013, and the Florida Society of Colonial Dames XVII Century, which co-sponsored the 1969 original, was asked to consider funding it.

Catherine Murat's house, Bellevue, is at the Tallahassee Museum. The state marker says she lived there from 1854 until shortly before her death on Aug. 6, 1867, and that the house was moved in 1967 from its original site on Jackson Bluff Road. The museum describes Bellevue as part of its Old Florida section of historic buildings and records that Catherine Murat owned twenty-five enslaved people, who worked the cotton fields, provided skilled labor and cooked for the household.

Her clothing has survived too. In June 2017 WFSU reported that a printed cotton dress of hers from 1854 had been restored by a textile conservator and would go on display at the Tallahassee Museum the following month.

The French names sit inside a larger early story. The Leon County marker at the County Courthouse on South Monroe Street records that Leon County was created by the territorial legislature in 1824 and that Tallahassee has been the state capital since 1824, later becoming home to Florida State University and Florida A&M University. Lafayette's township, Murat's grave on Call Street and the debated Frenchtown name all date from the first decade of that capital.