Florida History Museum in Need of an Update

I enjoy visiting history museums because I like history and I find it a relatively painless way to learn about the past and how it influences today. So it was a given that I would stop by the Museum of Florida History during a long weekend in Tallahassee, especially because I’d spent much of my childhood living in Florida, including fourth grade, when students learn about their state’s history.

I was looking forward to a refresher course on some of the things I’d learned as a child or remembered–Ponce de Leon and his search for the Fountain of Youth, Seminole Indians and the Trail of Tears, oranges, the Everglades, 1950s tourism, the beaches and Florida’s phenomenal growth throughout the 1900s that brought Northerners, including my parents’ families, to the Sunshine State.

What I found was a museum that concentrated largely on the Spanish presence in the region, admittedly a long time, from 1513 when Ponce de Leon claimed it for Spain to 1763 and again from 1783 to 1821, due mostly to Florida’s location as a safeguard for ships sailing between Central and South America and Spain. St. Augustine, of course, is Florida’s most obvious relic from those times, constructed as a military town to protect Spain’s fleet carrying mostly silver.

I also learned about the mastodons and other big mammals that died out or were hunted to extinction. Displays told me about the estimated 350,000 to one million Native Americans who were living here when Ponce de Leon arrived but whose numbers dwindled due to hostilities, disease brought by settlers and captivity as slaves. The museum chronicles Florida’s Confederate role during the Civil War, its rise as the world’s largest producer of citrus, and the waves of tourists following the construction of roads and the completion of Henry Flagler’s railway all the way to Key West in 1912. I also enjoyed the display case of tourist souvenirs from the early 1900s.

But it wasn’t so much what was in the museum as what was conspicuously missing. The museum ends shortly after World War II, thereby missing out on more 70 years of recent history. While there were mentions of the forced removal of the Seminoles, there was no mention of the heartbreaking Trail of Tears. The Everglades, quite possibly Florida’s most impressive physical sight, doesn’t merit more than a passing comment. Neither does Florida’s beaches, its cities like Miami and Orlando, or its nearly 500 native species, such as gators, manatees or the Florida panther.

And the museum certainly doesn’t talk about climate change and how that might affect what is already a water-logged state. Maybe that’s due to Florida’s governor at the time, Rick Scott, who, according to this article in the New Yorker, forbade state workers to discuss climate change or even use those words. Leonard Pitts, a columnist for the Miami Herald, wrote an open letter to Scott on March 15, 2016, about a study that projects as many as 13 million Americans, nearly half of them living in Florida, will be forced to flee or deal with seawater floods by 2100.

So it was with interest that I noticed a map in the Museum of Florida History showing the state’s landmass as it stands today, compared to how it looked more than 12,000 years ago. Back then, the sea level was more than 100 feet lower due to the last Ice Age, making Florida almost twice as large as it is now.

No doubt that map will eventually have to be revised, showing a shrinking shoreline no matter what you call it, at which time it might also be a good idea to bring Florida’s history museum into the 21st century.

For more on Florida, see my blogs Spain Left its Mark on St. Augustine and Travels with my 100-year-old Aunt, about Amelia Island. There’s also my article about Key West in gettingontravel.com: