A Confession of St. Augustine by William Dean Howells

WHEN we drove from the station up into the town, in the March of our / first sojourn, and saw the palmettoes all along the streets, among the / dim live-oaks and the shining magnolias, our doubting hearts lifted, and / we said: "Yes, yes, it is all true! This is St. Augustine as advertised: / the air, the sky, the wooden architecture of the 1870's and '80's, when / St. Augustine flourished most, and the memory of that dear Constance / Fenimore Woolson, who worshiped Florida past all Italy, was still sweet / in our literature. Yes, it is all incredibly true! " Then, as we made our / way to Mr. Hastings's beautiful masterpieces, the hotels Ponce de Leon / and Alcazar, and took refuge in the Neo-Andalusian of the simpler / hostelry from the Belated American of those obsolescent cottages, we / gathered our faith and courage more and more about us, and gave / ourselves to that charm of the place which has not yet failed us.

The charm is very complex, as a true charm always is, but the place is / very simple, as a place which has taken time to grow always is. It is / especially so if the place, like St. Augustine, has had its period of / waning as well as waxing, and has gently lapsed from its climax. The / heydey of its prosperity was in the years between the 1870's and '80's, / when St. Augustine promised to be lastingly, as it was most fitly, the / winter resort for the whole sneezing and coughing North. Then the Great / Freeze blasted the oranges and hopes of all Upper Florida; then / California flowered and fruited ahead; then the summer shores of Palm / Beach and Miami took the primacy from California, and Florida was again / the desire of our winter travel and sojourn, with a glory of motoring / and dancing such as Florida never knew before, or can ever know, at St. / Augustine. But the little city continued the metropolis of the mind and / heart for such as did not care to shine with the luster of money; and / those beautiful hotels remained without rivalry from the vast wooden / caravansaries of the more tropical resorts, and still remain holding / down their quarter of the local topography.

It is better, though, to own at once that the charm of St. Augustine / derives nothing from any thing like grandeur in the domestic / architecture of the past. In the Spanish city there were probably no / dwellings of such stateliness as the three or four mansions of our own / Colonial classic, which with their groves and gardens redeem the / American town from the reproach of those deplorable 'seventies and / 'eighties, when our eclectic architecture tried its 'prentice hand on so / many of the cottages. The Spaniards had built themselves unassuming / houses of coquina, always flush upon the sidewalks, and painted their / coating of stucco in the buffs and blues and pinks of the Latin taste; / and their dwellings never had the proportion of palaces, if one may / imagine them from the few that remain. But when you leave Mr. Hastings's / hotels, and keep along King Street eastward on the town plan, you are / almost at once in the Plaza, which is the heart of every Spanish town, / and which begins here with the fountained and palmettoed oblong / inclosing what was once the Spanish governor's palace, or so said to be. / It is now the American post-office and custom-house, but is inalienably / dignified and venerable, with some galleried facades of the same period / on one side, and a compendious reach of cheerful shops on the other.

These are on King Street, and you must cross St. George Street / (stretching crookedly northward with shops and hotels to the old city / gate, and southward with embowered dwellings of divers architectural / effects and intentions) before you are again at the Plaza, holding the / same eastward course to the shining bay, and to the long bridge built on / piers of palmetto logs after the fashion invented at York Harbor in / Maine and followed in the Long Bridge at Boston. But the bridge from St. / Augustine to Anastasia Island is longer than any other of its kind, even / that over the Piscataqua at Portsmouth which it also excels in the / enormity of its tolls, as you shall find when you cross it to the / snow-white billowing of the low northward sand-dunes and the thick gloom / of the cedar and live-oak woods rising from the water to the southward / in an illusion of uplands. All round the city where there are not / stretches of palmetto scrub and pine woods, there is the far sweep of / the salt-savannahs, with reed like grasses growing tall, and keeping / their Spanish brown from November till March, and then slowly turning / green, as it were insensibly, almost invisibly, after the use of / vegetation in the South. In the waters around, hidden in the deeps or / bristling from the shallows, grow the exhaustless ranks of the little / oysters, which before the white man came to know their deliciousness / left their shells by the million tons. These are still used in the / construction of the beautiful shell roads of the country round, now / replaced in the town by the harsh brick pavements which the municipality / is so proud of and which really hold down the dust as the shells could / not.