The Salt Line, Vol. 107: Pensacola Celebrates a Revolution It Spent on the Other Side
From the mailbag. The correspondents are imaginary. The news they ask about is not.
The Lead: a patriotic question, answered in Spanish
Dear Salt Line, my brother-in-law in Massachusetts says Florida sat out the American Revolution. He says it every Thanksgiving. Please help. — Outflanked on Innerarity Point
Dear Outflanked,
He’s half right, and the half he has is the dull one.
In 1776, Pensacola was the capital of British West Florida, and it stayed British while the colonies up the coast declared otherwise. The Revolution reached us in 1781 in the person of Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, who besieged the town and took it from the Crown that May. When the Spanish naval commander balked at sailing into the bay under British guns, Gálvez took his brig in first, through the Pass off the east end of Perdido Key, and the others followed. His king gave him a motto for it: Yo solo, “I alone.” Spain then kept Pensacola, apart from a couple of uninvited visits from Andrew Jackson, until 1821, when the United States finally took possession in a square still named for a Spanish king.
So Pensacola didn’t sit out the Revolution. It lost it, to Spain, which was at war with the same king Massachusetts was.
That’s the story the University of West Florida is telling tonight. Its Academy of American Civic Republicanism is hosting a free lecture on Gálvez and Spain’s role in the Battle of Pensacola at 6:30 at Old Christ Church downtown, given by the Gálvez scholar and author Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, as part of the America’s 250 FL Event Series. Registration is encouraged. I note, with real admiration, that an academy of American republicanism is marking the country’s 250th with a royal governor in the service of a Bourbon king. That isn’t a contradiction. It may be the most accurate thing said anywhere this anniversary year.
The national version will be bells, muskets and Philadelphia, and it’ll be fine. Ours is better because it’s inconvenient. A town that prints five flags on its brochures ought to be able to say which one was flying in 1776, and that the boldest thing ever done off the end of our island was done in Spanish, by a man Congress didn’t make an honorary citizen until 2014. Lafayette got there in 2002. Galveston, Texas, remembered him sooner. It’s named for him.
Go tonight if you can, and take notes for Thanksgiving. If you can’t, look across the Pass sometime this fall. That water spent the Revolution British and the next forty years Spanish, and it has never once looked bothered about it.
Pavement, applied after bedtime
Dear Salt Line, a friend says the state plans to repave my road while I’m asleep. Should I take that as a threat? — Light Sleeper off 292
Dear Light Sleeper, take it as a courtesy. This week’s list of road construction spots to avoid has intermittent lane closures on State Road 292, the road most of us take home to the Key, from east of Bauer Road to Manchester Street, between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., for paving, with the speed limit there cut to 35. Interstate 10 is being resurfaced from the Perdido River Bridge to west of U.S. 29, with the same overnight hours Sunday through Thursday. Overnight in the last week of September is as close as this coast ever comes to not needing its roads, and somebody at the state noticed. As for the 35, the working limit on 292 has always been set by the pickup ahead of you towing a center console.
🎸 The one long-range forecast nobody hedges
Dear Salt Line, it’s September. Is it too early to plan next summer? — Overprepared in Orange Beach
Dear Overprepared, the Wharf has planned it for you. Riley Green is bringing his “That’s Just Me” tour to The Wharf in Orange Beach on June 4, 2027, with Muscadine Bloodline, Hannah McFarland and Jake Worthington opening, and tickets go on sale Friday. Consider the nerve. This is a coast that, from June through November, won’t commit to a weekend until it has seen the five-day cone, and here is a named evening eight months out, on the fourth day of the 2027 hurricane season, offered for sale with no hedging whatsoever. Concert promoters are the last true optimists on the Gulf. Buy the ticket. Check the cone the week of, like the rest of us.
Hairnets, for the record
Dear Salt Line, is anything in this county still the way it was when I was a kid? — Nostalgic in Molino
Dear Nostalgic, some institutions endure. Friday was National Food Service Employee Day, and the Escambia County School District recognized the people who feed its students every school day. A Florida school year runs 180 days. The people in hairnets got one of them in their honor and spent it, naturally, serving lunch. At Pine Meadow Elementary, that lunch was a Dutch waffle, crispy chicken tenders, strawberries and cucumbers. A reader beneath the story allowed that it was a nice-looking lunch, then asked what the whole county really wants to know: “Is Wednesday still fried chicken day?”
The Closer
Today’s mail ran from 1781 to June 2027, and the present tense showed up only in the work nobody watches: a road paved after bedtime, a lunch served by people who get one Friday of thanks. A coast gets remembered for its sieges and sold by its concerts. It gets kept by hard hats and hairnets.
— Chris
P.S. Owners on either side of the state line: your specials, your menu link, even a promo code for readers can sit right on your page. Claiming it is free: /submit/claim/
