Tallahassee's Cascades Park is the site of the city's gala bicentennial festival

By Tom Flanigan | WFSU

The historic marker regarding the selection of Tallahassee as the site for Florida's territorial capital stands beside the modern replica of the first capitol building, a 20 by 40 foot log cabin.

Tallahassee was awash in history over the weekend of November 9 and 10. The Bicentennial Festival peaked on Sunday, which was the 200th anniversary of the Florida Territory's legislature meeting for the first time in the log cabin that served as the first capitol building.

A modern replica of that building now stands at the west end of Cascades Park. That's where Sally Karioth stood on Sunday and remembered the many local history columns written by her late husband Gerald Ensley during his years at the Tallahassee Democrat.

"He would be stunned to see what we were doing here today. But how he would have loved to have been here!"

Among those celebrating the city's two-hundredth birthday, members of the Second Infantry Regiment U.S. Colored Troops. Sergeant Major Jarvis Rozier noting that just 26th years after that first meeting of lawmakers, Tallahassee was a divided community.

"Tallahassee/Leon County was 73% African American. There were 3,194 Caucasian and 9,084 African Americans, but they were enslaved. That's the story that needs to be told and that's why we do what we do."

It's a story that Rozier and many others are determined to tell as the city's third century begins.