Tallahassee to Jacksonville: The Florida Interior
Near Tallahassee, Florida
This is not the Florida that appears in travel photography. There are no palm-lined beaches here, no neon art deco hotels, no cruise ship terminals. This is the Florida interior: longleaf pine forest, wiregrass, scrub oak, and red clay, a landscape that looks more like south Georgia than anything the tourism industry sells.
It is old Florida, which is to say it is the Florida that existed before air conditioning made the rest of the state habitable enough to develop. Tallahassee is the state capital. It is here because, in eighteen twenty-four, it was the geographic compromise between Pensacola and Saint Augustine, the two existing towns, both of which wanted the capital.
Tallahassee was equidistant from them. It had no other particular claim to the site. The Apalachee people had a major settlement complex in this area before disease, Spanish rule, and the Carolina-backed raids of seventeen oh four destroyed their society.
The mission system that the Spanish established across north Florida in the seventeenth century extended as far west as the Apalachicola River. Those missions are largely gone. The Apalachee people do not have federal recognition as a tribe.
They are still here. The drive from Tallahassee to Jacksonville takes you through the Big Bend region where the Florida peninsula meets the Florida Panhandle, through Suwannee River country and the cattle country of Alachua and Columbia counties. It is not dramatic scenery.
It is the kind of country that requires attention rather than spectacle to understand. Jacksonville, when you arrive, is the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States. It got that way through municipal consolidation in nineteen sixty-eight.
Most of that land is very flat.
