Geronimo Was Held Prisoner Here — and Became a Tourist Attraction

When Geronimo and fifteen other Apache men arrived as prisoners of war at Fort Pickens in October 1886, Pensacola business leaders had specifically lobbied to have them sent here rather than elsewhere, hoping to profit off Geronimo's fame. It worked immediately: roughly 2,000 people crowded the wharf just to watch the prisoners get ferried in. Over the following months, visitors kept arriving by train and ferry specifically to see them, with hundreds showing up on a single Sunday to stare through the fort's walls while the prisoners were put to work clearing weeds and repairing the old fortifications. The army finally moved them out in 1888 over fears of yellow fever in the area — but for nearly two years, one of the most famous men in America was held, and gawked at, on this exact stretch of Santa Rosa Island.

Pensacola has a real claim to being the first European settlement in what is now the continental United States — six years before St. Augustine gets the credit. Tristán de Luna landed a large fleet in this bay in 1559 intending to found a permanent Spanish colony, but a hurricane wrecked most of the ships within weeks and the settlement collapsed entirely within two years, leaving nothing behind to anchor the claim. St. Augustine, founded in 1565, gets to call itself the oldest continuously occupied city in the country only because Pensacola's head start ended in a storm before it had the chance.