Page 49 - John Anderson

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Chapter 3

Outdoorsmen’s Paradise

Early Plantation History
John Anderson arrived in the New Britain Colony about 10-years after
the Civil War ended and information about the vast pre-history of this
area at best, was non-existent, at least in the minds of the settlers
forming the New Britain colony. In the previous 300 years or so,
Halifax Country had played a major role between France, Spain,
Britain and the America’s as early plantations were developed,
destroyed and redeveloped. John would soon learn that this part of
the country had a very complex and exciting history and that he would
also become an important part of it, as the years progressed.
During the First Spanish Period (1565 to 1763), settlements in
Florida were dominated by military garrisons, missions, and strategic
ports.
The Spanish method of gathering the indigenous Floridians into
mission centers to convert them to Catholicism greatly contributed to
their extinction as cultures by the early 1700s. Once gathered into
densely populated missions, they lost their customary methods of
survival and became more vulnerable to epidemics. Spanish power
struggles with the British also led to the natives' further decimation.
In a desperate effort to find Indian allies, the Spanish encouraged the
movement of Creek Indians into Florida from the north to fill the void
left by the declining indigenous cultures.
By the Treaty of Paris, which in 1763 ended the Seven Years War
(French and Indian War,) Spain ceded to Great Britain the province of
Florida. The French and Indian War is the common U.S. name for the
war between Great Britain and France in North America from 1754 to
1763. The war was fought primarily along the frontiers between the
British colonies from Virginia to Nova Scotia, and began with a
dispute over the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela
Rivers, the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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