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Lincolnville Historic District
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House in the district
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| Location: | St. Augustine, Florida United States |
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| Area: | 1,400 acres (5.7 km2) |
| NRHP Reference#: | 91000979[1] |
| Added to NRHP: | November 29, 1991 |
The Lincolnville Historic District covering the southwest peninsula of the "nation's oldest city," is a U.S. Historic District (designated as such on November 29, 1991) located in St. Augustine, Florida. The district is bounded by Cedar, Riberia, Cerro and Washington Streets and DeSoto Place. It contained 548 historic buildings at the time of its National Register listing, but the city of St. Augustine engaged in extensive demolitions in Lincolnville in the 1990s (and continues to seek more in the 21st century), so the number of surviving buildings is now much smaller.
It was established by freed slaves in 1866, when Peter Sanks, Matilda Papy, Harriet Weedman, Miles Hancock, Israel McKenzie, Aaron DuPont and Tom Solana leased land for $1.00 a year on what was then the west bank of Maria Sanchez Creek, across from the developed part of St. Augustine. The rest of that peninsula consisted of orange grove plantations: the Dumas plantation "Yalaha" (Seminole word for orange) at the northern end and "Buena Esperanza" (Spanish for "Good Hope") plantation at the south.
The settlement was originally called Africa, or Little Africa, but after streets were laid out in 1878, it came to be known as Lincolnville (the northwest corner of modern Lincolnville was a 5-acre (20,000 m2) orange grove owned in the 1860s by Abraham Lincoln's private secretary, John Hay--later Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt). Over the decades the settlement expanded from the northeast corner, around present-day Washington, Oneida, Dumas, St. Francis, St. Benedict and DeHaven Streets (noted for narrow streets, small lots, and houses built close to the street line, in lineal descent from colonial St. Augustine style and land-use pattern) to embrace the entire peninsula.[2]
When Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler came to St. Augustine in the 1880s and redeveloped the city as a "Winter Newport," his changes inevitably affected Lincolnville. For one thing, he filled in the northern reaches of Maria Sanchez Creek to create high ground (using, as landfill, dirt excavated from the site of Fort Mose)--and his Standard Oil partner William Warden dredged the southern part to create what is now Maria Sanchez Lake. This expanded the eastern boundary of Lincolnville to one of its major buildings, the Ponce de Leon Barracks, servants quarters for Flagler's hotels. at 172-180 Cordova Street. Some of the black waiters at the hotels formed America's first professional black baseball team. When they played here, they were known as the Ponce de Leon Giants, and when they played in the north they were known as the Cuban Giants. One member of the team, Frank Grant, is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. In the 1940s the Flagler estate had the Barracks converted to the Lakeside Apartments (for whites only), and in the 21st century it became a condominium, with no mention made of its interesting history. Jacksonville native James Weldon Johnson wrote about the baseball team in his 1933 autobiography Along This Way.