09/25/2026
You can't know the history of St. Augustine until you know Lincolnville.
The incredible mural in the heart of Lincolnville tells the story of a neighborhood that changed America.
Most people know St. Augustine as the oldest city. What they don't know is that it was also one of the FIRST places in the entire country where freedom actually came.
Here's why:
When the Civil War began, St. Augustine was quickly occupied by Union troops in March of 1862 and they held it for the rest of the war. Because of that, when President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, it could actually be enforced here.
Military authorities ordered all enslaved people in the area to gather at what is now The Collector Inn & Gardens to hear the Proclamation read aloud. Roughly 672 men, women, and children in St. Augustine were freed that day — making St. Augustine one of the very few places in the South where the Proclamation freed slaves immediately, while most of the Confederacy wouldn't see freedom for another 2+ years.
In 1866, those newly freed families — largely Gullah Geechee people of West African heritage — built their own community on the old Yallaha orange grove plantation just southwest of downtown. They first called it "Little Africa." Three years after the Proclamation, it was renamed Lincolnville in honor of President Lincoln.
Lincolnville went on to become so much more:
• A thriving middle-class Black community during segregation with 548 historic Victorian buildings — now a National Historic District • Home to St. Benedict the Moor School (1898), Excelsior School - St. Augustine's first Black public high school and now the Lincolnville Museum & Cultural Center • The epicenter of the 1964 Civil Rights Movement in St. Augustine, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planned marches and sit-ins that directly led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
This mural, with its nod to the old Dairy and community life on Washington and Oneida Streets, is living history.
Come see it with us! Pastime Tours takes you beyond the Castillo walls and into the real stories that built this city.
Lincolnville is not a side note. It IS the history of St. Augustine.
