1839 Seminole War Map is Gift of History to Library

By David Vest/Newsfeatures Editor/Panama City News Herald

When Ted Rybicki spotted a history-sharing opportunity, he couldn’t pass it up.

As a result, the Bay County Public Library now has a link to Florida of 1839. It’s a copy of a state map commissioned by Army Gen. Zachary Taylor during the Seminole wars of that era.

Rybicki, who lives in Lynn Haven, donated the map to the library’s Local History Room, through the Historical Society of Bay County. He also intends to donate a copy to the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee.

The original is in the 35-story SunTrust Bank Centre in Orlando that was built in the 1980s. Rybicki was a vice president for corporate communications with SunTrust before he retired to Lynn Haven with his wife, Rena, in 1992.

An art collector provided the map along with other works to a committee looking for art to hang on the SunTrust headquarter’s walls. “Most of it was contemporary art,” Rybicki said. But the 1839 map caught his eye.

“I thought it was a shame for it to be in some executive’s office, out of sight of the public,” he said. “So I surreptitiously had a couple of copies made.”

‘Miami was a swamp’

“Old Rough and Ready” Gen. Taylor, who later would become the nation’s 12th president, commissioned the map just after he took command of all U.S. Army troops during the Second Seminole War. It was that era’s equivalent of the Vietnam War, according to “The Seminole Wars” by John and Mary Lou Missal, published in 2004 by the University of Florida Press.

The war lasted seven years and killed 1,500 soldiers and countless people in the Seminole nation. More than 3,000 Seminoles were forcibly removed from Florida. A third Seminole war, just before the Civil War, made a final attempt to remove what was left of the Seminole nation from the Everglades.

This particular map has the Apalachicola river as its western edge, in keeping with a traditional dividing line for West and East Florida. West of Tallahassee and St. Marks, the only significant details are the settlements of Aspalaga and Quincy, near the Georgia border.

Rybicki said what struck him most was that “major towns were not even in existence. Tampa was not even in existence. Miami was a swamp.”

What showed up most on the Florida territory’s map was military outposts. In 1838, Taylor had divided the state into 20-squaremile grids and designated a “fort” in the center of each, says an account in “Seminole Wars.” Many were meager buildings, far from being fortresses.

But all were intended to discourage Indian attacks on white Floridians and settlers moving south from Alabama and Georgia.

The forts especially fired his imagination, Rybicki said. “So many of them are out in the middle of nowhere. They’d be great for students ... to do archeological explorations.”

Showing off history

Rebecca Saunders, the library’s local history specialist, said the 1839 map is a great addition to the Local History Room, which has expanded into much-needed space in the new library.

“I’d have to check whether we have anything that old” in the room’s collections, she said. “But I do know we have Indian artifacts” from far back.

Saunders said the library is gradually doing justice to historical displays that once were in a cramped room in the old building next to City Hall and the Panama City Marina. She’s particularly eager to get picture rails to hang such treasures as Rybicki’s map. “It’s a new building,” she said, “so we hate to put holes in the wall.”

With Panama City celebrating its centennial, she said, the room has lots of resources for research. A street map of St. Andrews in 1877 is of particular interest. So is a book donated by Black Insurance Co., showing details about each land parcel down to building shape and size. It was used by real estate agents and the fire department, and it was updated yearly from 1939 to 1960.

Rybicki is among those especially fond of browsing in the Local History Room. His copy of the 1839 map seemed like a natural addition. “This is just a fascinating place,” he said. “We need to tell the world it’s here.”