Major William Lauderdale and the Fort That Named a City

In the winter of eighteen thirty-eight, this stretch of the New River had no city, no streets, no name that would outlast the century. It had a war. The Second Seminole War had dragged on for years as the United States Army tried to force the Seminole and Miccosukee people out of Florida and west of the Mississippi.

The Army wanted a supply post on the lower east coast, and General Thomas Jesup turned to a Tennessee planter and soldier named William Lauderdale, then in his mid fifties, who had raised a battalion of about five hundred mounted Tennessee volunteers. Lauderdale marched them south, cutting a military road as he went. On the sixth of March, eighteen thirty-eight, his men reached the north bank of the New River and threw up a fortification in a matter of days.

It was a wooden blockhouse roughly thirty feet square and two stories tall, later wrapped in a stockade. Impressed that the road and the camp had gone up in only four days, Jesup issued a special order naming the post Fort Lauderdale in honor of its commander. The major would never watch the town that carried his name take root.

Worn down by the campaign, he started home to Tennessee and died near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eleventh of May, eighteen thirty-eight, only weeks after the fort was named. Historians generally attribute his death to a blood clot in the lungs. The fort itself did not stay put.

It was moved twice over the next year, once closer to the beach near the inlet, and it was finally abandoned around eighteen forty-two as the war wound down. What Lauderdale left behind was not a settlement but a name on the map and a cleared road, and for decades the site sat nearly empty, home to Seminole camps, a scattering of traders, and the slow green work of the river. When a real town finally rose here at the turn of the twentieth century, it borrowed the name of a soldier who had spent only a few weeks on this ground and died a thousand miles away.

That is how a Tennessee volunteer who never lived here became the namesake of a city of hundreds of thousands.