Chaires, Florida: Where Plantation Country Met the Seminole Wars
Near Tallahassee, Florida
The community of Chaires in eastern Leon County takes its name from three brothers, Green Hill, Benjamin, and Thomas Peter Chaires, who arrived from Georgia in the eighteen twenties and established vast cotton plantations in what was then Florida Territory. Benjamin Chaires built Verdura, a plantation of nine thousand four hundred forty acres. His brother Green Chaires lost his wife and two children in an eighteen thirty-nine raid during the Second Seminole War.
Green Chaires built the state's first plank road in eighteen fifty-one, connecting inland plantations to the Gulf Coast port of Saint Marks. The area grew into a small commercial hub with a cotton gin, stores, and schools. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in December two thousand.
Today Chaires is a quiet unincorporated community east of Tallahassee, but its landscape still holds the remnants of the plantation world that defined early territorial Florida.
