UNCOVERING THE HISTORY OF
Underground Railroad Sites IN NORTHWEST FLORIDA by Dakota Parks
In March 2020, Gulf Islands National Seashore Park Ranger, Casimer Rosiecki began researching and uncovering the history of the Underground Railroad site at Fort Pickens, leading to its official designation as a site on the network in September 2020. Through compiling and analyzing official correspondences and reports written by Union and Confederate soldiers, newspaper clippings and even soldiers’ diaries and letters, Rosiecki began to uncover additional accounts of freedom seekers entering the Union camp at Fort Barrancas.
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very year, researchers uncover never-before-seen or analyzed documents, artifacts and correspondence that help us better understand landmark historical periods, such as the American Civil War, fought in part right here in Northwest Florida. Through new research brought to light, the 64-acre Fort Barrancas Area, located on the Pensacola Naval Air Station and managed by Gulf Islands National Seashore, has been officially recognized as a site on the Underground Railroad, joining nearly 700 sites, programs and facilities on the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Contrary to misconception, the network does not refer to a physical subterranean railroad structure, instead the Underground Railroad refers to the network of routes, safe houses and people, both African American and white, that aided enslaved African Americans in their escape to freedom. This national designation helps honor, preserve and promote the history of the black freedom struggle and the resistance to slavery in the United States.
When asked why it has taken so long for Fort Pickens and the Fort Barrancas Area to be recognized as sites on the Underground Railroad, Rosiecki explained that the history has gone largely untapped. “The subject of the Underground Railroad hasn’t received a lot of attention from academic historians, but that is slowly changing,” he said. “I think the continuous use of the landscape by the U.S. Military also didn’t provide public or academic historians with the means to investigate the stories related to those areas. This is just one example of how new research is uncovering these really
powerful and complex stories about enslaved black people playing active roles in their liberation and their emancipation.” The Fort Barrancas Area includes three historic structures: The Spanish Water Battery, Advanced Redoubt and Fort Barrancas. Completed in 1844, the Army Corps of Engineers built Fort Barrancas over the ruins of other forts built by the Spanish and British as early as the 18th century. Although Fort Barrancas was built to stop any foreign invasion and provided defense for the Pensacola Navy DOWNTOWNCROWD.COM | 15
