47 Fun Facts About Tallahassee

Where did Florida's government first meet in Tallahassee in 1824?

Log cabins. A proper capitol begun two years later was never finished, and from 1839 it gave way to the building that still stands in front of the modern tower.

Tallahassee was chosen as capital in 1824 for lying roughly midway between St. Augustine and which city?

Pensacola. Spain had run East and West Florida as separate colonies from those two towns, so when the United States merged them into one territory it laid out a new capital halfway between.

The name Tallahassee comes from a Muskogean word usually translated as what?

Old town. The Creek name is thought to join the words for a tribal town and for old; a Seminole town there seems to have borne it before the capital did, and some render it 'old fields'.

Which Spanish explorer's expedition wintered at Anhaica, in present-day Tallahassee, in 1539–40?

Hernando de Soto. Proof came only in 1987, when a state archaeologist poking around a building site turned up a shard of early Spanish olive jar, and then chain mail and crossbow bolts.

A Spanish expedition's 1539 winter camp in Tallahassee is often called the first US site to celebrate what?

Christmas. No chronicle of the expedition mentions it: the claim rests on the priests who travelled with the army, who would have said Mass that December.

Which Native people had their capital at Anhaica, on the site of modern Tallahassee?

The Apalachee. Spanish explorers wrote their name on early maps of the country to the north, and it stuck to a mountain range hundreds of miles away: the Appalachians.

Which French hero of the American Revolution got 36 square miles from Congress, much of it now Tallahassee?

The Marquis de Lafayette. He had spent some $200,000 of his own money on the American cause and lost the rest in France's revolution, so in 1824 Congress repaid him in cash and a township of his choosing.

Achille Murat, who settled near Tallahassee in the 1820s, was a nephew of which European ruler?

Napoleon Bonaparte. The son of the emperor's sister turned frontier planter in Florida, and there he married a great-grandniece of George Washington.

What set Tallahassee apart from every other Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi during the Civil War?

It was never captured. Local militia turned back a Union march on the city a few miles away in March 1865, only weeks before the war ended.

Which small Civil War battle was fought south-east of Tallahassee in March 1865?

The Battle of Natural Bridge. The defenders included teenage cadets from the local college that later grew into Florida State University.

What tops Florida's 22-storey New Capitol in Tallahassee?

An observation deck. The Capitol's own museum says townspeople asked for it: climbing to the cupola of the old dome for the view had been a local tradition since 1902.

Which architect of Washington's Kennedy Center designed Florida's New Capitol tower in Tallahassee?

Edward Durell Stone. His tower was the legislature's answer to a 1967 campaign to move the capital out of Tallahassee: the money for a new complex was voted five years later.

What did Florida's governor want done with Tallahassee's Old Capitol in 1978, once the new tower had opened?

Demolition. The House speaker agreed with him, but a citizens' campaign saved the building, and it reopened in 1982 as a museum, restored to the way it looked in 1902.

In the 1960s a movement tried to move Florida's capital to which city?

Orlando. The 1967 push by a Miami senator failed, and instead frightened the legislature into building the new Capitol in Tallahassee, where a plaque credits him with provoking it.

Which document did a Union general read aloud from the steps of Tallahassee's Knott House on 20 May 1865?

The Emancipation Proclamation. The reading told the enslaved people of north Florida they were free more than two years after Lincoln signed it, which is why 20 May is kept as Emancipation Day in Florida.

Florida State has the Seminoles, but what are the teams of Tallahassee's other university, Florida A&M, called?

The Rattlers. One of them, Althea Gibson, was still a student on a sports scholarship there when she broke tennis's colour bar at the US national championships in 1950.

What is the name of Florida A&M's famous band?

The Marching 100. France invited it to represent the United States in the Bastille Day parade of 1989, the bicentennial of the Revolution, and it has since marched in inaugural parades for two presidents.

Florida A&M opened in 1887 to train which profession?

Teachers. It opened as the State Normal College for Colored Students with fifteen students and two instructors, and within four years had added farming and trades as the state's land-grant college for Black students.

For 42 years, from 1905 to 1947, Florida State was what kind of institution?

A women's college. What ended it was the Second World War: so many returning veterans wanted places that men were sent to the Tallahassee campus in 1946, and it went coeducational the next year.

Which national laboratory has its headquarters at Florida State University in Tallahassee?

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It is paid for by the National Science Foundation and the state together, and scientists from around the world are given time on its record-setting magnets free of charge.

What are Florida State's colours?

Garnet and gold. By the university's account the garnet is a blend: its champion football teams of 1904 and 1905 wore purple, the students then voted for crimson, and the administration mixed the two.

Which coach arrived at Florida State in 1976 and had only one losing season in 34 years?

Bobby Bowden. The one losing year was his first, with a team that had won four games in the three seasons before he came; he went on to 28 straight bowl appearances and two national titles.

Who was Doak Campbell, the man Florida State's football stadium is named after?

FSU's first president. Doak Campbell took charge of the college in 1941 and was still in office when it became a university in 1947; the stadium that opened three years later took his name.

Florida State's 'war chant' and tomahawk chop were taken up in 1991 by fans of which baseball team?

Atlanta Braves. The chant appears to have started by accident at a 1984 game against Auburn, when students kept up a tune after the university band had stopped playing it.

Tallahassee's 1956 bus boycott came soon after a more famous one started in which city?

Montgomery. In Tallahassee it was two Florida A&M students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, who sat in the whites-only seats; early the next year the city dropped segregated seating from its bus franchise.

Which Tallahassee neighbourhood is often described as the oldest historically Black neighbourhood in Florida?

Frenchtown. The name comes from settlers who arrived from France in the 1830s and mostly gave up and left; families freed from slavery made the district their own after the Civil War.

Which Nobel-winning physicist, who predicted antimatter, spent his last years as a professor in Tallahassee?

Paul Dirac. He retired from Cambridge in 1969, took a chair at Florida State and stayed until his death in 1984, walking to his office each day and swimming in nearby lakes in summer.

For six weeks in late 2000, Tallahassee was the centre of world attention because of what?

The presidential election recount. Florida's officials certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes out of six million, and the lawsuits ran on until the US Supreme Court stopped the counting.

What did a state convention meeting in Tallahassee's Capitol vote to do on 10 January 1861?

Secede from the Union. Four years later the same building was where Union troops ran up the Stars and Stripes to mark Florida's surrender.

Which moss-draped tree arches over Tallahassee's nine official canopy roads?

The Southern live oak. By the city's own account several of the roads began as footpaths between Native villages and were later the tracks along which planters hauled their cotton to market.

Tallahassee holds Florida's all-time record for what, set on 13 February 1899?

The lowest temperature. A city that has reached 105 °F in June fell to −2 °F in the Great Blizzard of 1899, the only below-zero reading in Florida's records.

Which unusual student troupe did Florida State University set up in 1947?

A circus. The Flying High Circus has no animal acts and no professionals: its student performers rig their own equipment, sew their own costumes and put up the big top themselves.

What does a rider dressed as Osceola plant at midfield before each Florida State home football game?

A flaming spear. The ride on an Appaloosa called Renegade began in 1978, after a graduate won the permission of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which also approves the rider's regalia.

Which Florida rapper and singer took his stage name from Tallahassee, the city where he grew up?

T-Pain. The name is short for 'Tallahassee Pain', after the hard times he had there, and his hits made the studio tool Auto-Tune into a pop sound of its own.

Which post-grunge band formed in Tallahassee in the mid-1990s?

Creed. Scott Stapp, then a Florida State student, started the band with his old school friend Mark Tremonti, and its 1999 album Human Clay sold more than ten million copies.

Which funk pioneer made Tallahassee his home in the 1990s and was given the key to the city in 2024?

George Clinton. The founder of Parliament-Funkadelic told the city commission he had been there thirty years, then led the chamber in a chorus of 'We want the funk'.

The 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon was shot at which spring south of Tallahassee?

Wakulla Springs. Its clear, deep water had already stood in for the African jungle, when Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan films were shot there some years earlier.

The Florida Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee was designed to resemble which president's home?

Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Jackson had set up Florida's first American government in 1821, and the mansion completed in 1956 was modelled on his Tennessee home.

The Tallahassee Meridian, a line first measured out in 1824, is the starting point for doing what across Florida?

Surveying the land. A federal surveyor ran his chains through the woods in the year the capital was founded, and property lines across the state are reckoned from the point where his lines cross.

Which county is Tallahassee the seat and only incorporated municipality of?

Leon. The county was created in 1824, the year the capital was founded there, and named for Juan Ponce de León, the first European known to have reached Florida.

Tallahassee is the largest city in which two Florida regions?

The Big Bend and the Panhandle. It sits where the Gulf coast turns from one into the other, far from the big cities of the peninsula, which is why southern legislators have tried more than once to move the capital.

Tall Timbers, a research station on an old hunting estate north of Tallahassee, is known for studying the deliberate use of what?

Fire. Its founder, a sportsman, left the estate for research into how burning affects wildlife habitat, and the station now defends landowners' right to set prescribed fires.

Which Mississippian-culture earthworks site, built around 1200, is a state park on Tallahassee's north side?

Lake Jackson Mounds. Its builders raised seven earthen mounds, and a 1970s salvage dig in one of them turned up copper plates in the style of Etowah in Georgia, signs of long-distance trade.

In 2025 Tallahassee won which civic title for the third time?

All-America City. The National Civic League names ten communities a year, and Tallahassee, a winner in 1999 and 2015, built its 2025 bid on a plan for its Southside, a clean-energy plan and its hundred parks.

In the 2009 comedy Zombieland, which actor plays the zombie-killing survivor known only as Tallahassee?

Woody Harrelson. The film's survivors go by place names instead of their own, so Tallahassee crosses the country with Columbus, Wichita and Little Rock, hunting for the last Twinkie.

Which Amtrak train stopped serving Tallahassee in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina wrecked the tracks?

The Sunset Limited. For twelve years it had been Amtrak's one coast-to-coast train, linking Los Angeles with Florida; when Gulf Coast service finally resumed in 2025 it went no farther east than Mobile, Alabama.

Tallahassee sits at the southern end of which upland region, just above the Cody Scarp?

The Red Hills. After the Civil War, wealthy northerners bought up many of its former cotton plantations and turned them into winter quail-hunting estates.