Fort Dallas and the Seminole Wars on the Miami River

Many people are surprised to learn that Miami's first permanent American presence was a military fort, built during a war over the Florida interior.

The Dade battle

In December 1835, Seminole warriors attacked a column of U.S. soldiers under Major Francis L. Dade in central Florida, killing nearly all of them. The battle opened the Second Seminole War, one of the longest and most expensive Indian wars in U.S. history. When Florida's territorial legislature created a new county in South Florida in 1836, it named it Dade County in the major's memory. (It became Miami-Dade County in 1997.)

A plantation becomes a fort

In the 1830s, Richard Fitzpatrick had established a plantation on the Miami River using enslaved labor, but abandoned it as the war spread. In 1836 the Army established Fort Dallas on the river as a base for operations in the Everglades. The fort was occupied on and off through the Seminole Wars and abandoned for good in the 1850s.

The Everglades as refuge

The war drove many Seminoles deep into the Everglades and Big Cypress, using the wetlands as a refuge the Army struggled to penetrate. Soldiers' maps and reports from these campaigns were among the first written descriptions of the interior marsh.

A building that moved

A stone building from the old plantation and fort, later known as the Fort Dallas barracks, survived into the 20th century. In 1925 it was taken apart and moved to Lummus Park, where it still stands, one of the oldest structures in Miami.

Three wars over Florida

The First Seminole War (1817 to 1818) involved U.S. forces under Andrew Jackson invading Spanish Florida. The Second Seminole War (1835 to 1842) was the longest and most costly. The Third Seminole War (1855 to 1858) ended with most remaining Seminoles removed, but a few hundred stayed in the Everglades and Big Cypress, never formally surrendering.

The Cape Florida Lighthouse attack

In 1836, during the Second Seminole War, the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne was attacked and set on fire. The keeper's assistant was killed, and the keeper barely survived. The lighthouse was later rebuilt and still stands in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, the oldest standing structure in Miami-Dade County.

Soldiers in the Everglades

U.S. forces conducted expeditions into the Everglades by canoe, a hard and dangerous kind of warfare in heat, mosquitoes and sawgrass. These expeditions produced early maps and descriptions of the interior and showed how well the Seminoles used the wetlands for defense.

Fort Dallas today

The reconstructed Fort Dallas building in Lummus Park, along with the nearby Wagner Homestead, offers a window into Miami's 19th-century frontier. They are a short walk from the river where it all began.