Julee Cottage and Pensacola's Free Black Community
Near Pensacola, Florida
The small wood-frame house at two-ten East Zaragoza Street is easy to miss in the middle of the Seville Historic District. But it carries a story that cuts against almost everything Americans assume about the antebellum South.
The building is Julee Cottage, built around eighteen oh five, and it was owned by a free woman of color named Julee Panton. She lived here and supported herself selling baked goods and candles in the streets of Spanish and then American Pensacola, a free Black woman in a slave state, operating a small business, owning property in the heart of town.
Her existence was made possible by a peculiarity of Pensacola's history. Under Spanish colonial rule, the legal status of free people of color was more complex and in some ways more protected than under Anglo-American law. The Spanish colonial system recognized gradations of status, allowed some paths toward manumission, and operated a Catholic framework that created at least nominal spiritual equality among the baptized. Pensacola's Creole community, a mix of African, Spanish, French, and Native ancestry, was substantial enough to form its own social networks, its own church, and its own economic life within the broader colonial town.
Tradition says that Julee purchased enslaved people and then gave them conditions that allowed them to work toward their freedom. The records here go quiet on the specifics. Historians have found no documentary evidence confirming the tradition as precisely stated, though documents do confirm that she purchased enslaved people and that the story has been passed down within the Black community here for two centuries.
After American annexation in eighteen twenty-one, the more rigid racial codes of the Anglo-American South began to press down on Pensacola's Creole community. The legal space that people like Julee Panton had occupied slowly contracted. The cottage now houses the Black History Museum of West Florida, the first stop on the city's African American Heritage Trail.
