Pensacola stakes claim as ‘oldest city’ with flying banner over St. Augustine

So Pensacola barfly chauvinists have a Go Fund Me page to pay for an obnoxious banner flown over St. Augustine on our 454th Anniversary.

I have a better idea: support independent zealous advocacy and investigative reporting to help us make St. Augustine a better place. www.gofundme.com/edslavin


Thank you.

Pensacola stakes claim as ‘oldest city’ with flying banner over St. Augustine
By Travis Gibson tgibson@staugustine.com
Posted at 6:22 PM
St. Augustine Record

As St. Augustine residents celebrated the founding of the oldest city in America on Saturday at the Mission Nombre de Dios, a Pensacola brewery took the opportunity to stake its claim as the real oldest city in the country by flying a banner above.

The banner, which was towed by a airplane high above downtown Saturday afternoon, read “1. Pensacola 2. St. Augustine”.

Perfect Plain Brewery owner DC Reeves was behind the stunt, according to the Pensacola News Journal. He started a GoFundMe page to pay for the banner on Thursday and raised over $2,400 from 50 donors.

“We were going to put ‘Happy birthday little brother, love Pensacola’ on the banner but we found out it wouldn’t fit,” Reeves said Thursday. “Too many letters.”

Reeves’s claim that Pensacola is America’s oldest city is based on a discovery by researchers at the University of West Florida in Pensacola who say they proved Spanish Explorer Tristan de Luna established his Spanish colony of Pensacola in 1559, six years before St. Augustine was founded.

Susan Parker, Executive Director at the St. Augustine Historical Society, wrote in The Record in 2011 that “Pensacola might be claiming the title of ‘oldest’ today if it were not for a hurricane that struck and doomed that settlement in its very first days in 1559...The settlement at Pensacola held on until the summer of 1561, when the once-hopeful colonists sailed away.”

Researchers at UWF agreed, finding the settlement in Pensacola disbanded after about two years.

“Six years later, in the middle of September 1565, St. Augustine’s founders took advantage of a hurricane to eliminate its French rivals in this area,” Parker wrote. Founder’s Day now celebrates the anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine by Pedro Menendez de Aviles on Sept. 8, 1565.

St. Augustine claim of “oldest city” really means that it is recognized as the nation’s oldest continuously occupied European settlement, “founded more than 50 years before the English landed in Jamestown or the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.”

It’s a claim that Reeves takes issue with.

“Remember that one time when St. Augustine thought 1565 came before 1559? Us too,” Perfect Plain Brewery wrote on its Instagram page. “Here at this wonderful place, the Luna Settlement, we’ve provided a friendly reminder of how to tell time.”