EAST FLORIDA PAPERS ONLINE AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The East Florida Papers represent the official local record of the government of St. Augustine, Florida, during the late colonial, or Second Spanish, period (1783-1821), along with some documents about earlier eras. The collection is housed at the Library of Congress and is now online in digital format. St. Augustine was at this time capital of Spanish East Florida (which comprised the Florida peninsula east of the Apalachicola River). Census records, royal orders, decrees, and other documents can be found in this collection. This collection is also an important source of diplomatic records, such as documenting Spanish relations with the Creek and other native peoples, and with the British trading house of Panton, Leslie, and Co. The documents have been housed in the nation's capital since 1905. One segment, the Spanish land grants from this period, are maintained at the Florida State Archive and are available online.
An index to the East Florida Papers is also available online, created at the University of Florida in the 1970s and digitized under a grant from the St. Augustine Foundation/Historic St. Augustine Research Institute in 1998. This index provides brief English-language abstracts to the documents in the Papers. Proper names for people, places, ships, etc. area also included in the abstracts. The index is searchable and cross-referenced to the microfilm set created by the Library of Congress, Results can be re-ordered by date, section number, or microfilm reel number. For reference with the digital version, use the Section Name, Section Number, Date, and Heading of the document as a way to locate specific documents. Section names and numbers are given under the "Browse" function.
Map of East and West Florida, circa 1781. Courtesy of UF Digital Collection.
"From these sources [in the East Florida Papers], many works on Florida's political and military history have been written by American and Spanish scholars such as Joseph B. Lockey, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Janice Borton Miller, and Juan Marchena Fernandez. These works provide the foundation for many subsequent studies."
- Sherry Johnson, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1992)
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