Gerald Ensley: Hail Tallahassee! A better name than Tonaby’s Town
(This column was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat on May 5, 2017.)
Tallahassee is a wonderfully mellifluous name, whose sound carries a bit of whimsy.
That’s why the name has been used in so many songs, stories, books, movies and TV shows. The Wikipedia entry for “Tallahassee in popular culture,” has nearly 100 examples (without listing several dozen more known to aficionados).The Tallahassee name was bestowed by Seminole-Creek Indians and means “old fields” or “old town.” The name is drawn from the Indian words “talwa” for town and “hasi” for old. However, some ethnographers maintain “hasi” (spelled ahassee, hasi or hase) is also the Muscogee-Creek word for “sun” – and thus Tallahassee is “Sun Town.”
The unique name is a source of affection for Tallahassee natives and residents, because it’s unforgettable. The average person may not be able to identify the capitals of Vermont (Montpelier) or South Dakota (Pierre), but everyone knows the capital of Florida.So it’s interesting to consider we could have just as easily been named the more prosaic-sounding Tonaby’s Town – or perhaps even Taloofa.
For a few years, the Midtown Merchants Association hosted Tallahassee Taloofa Fest on a closed-off section of Thomasville Road to celebrate the bars, restaurants and shops of Midtown.
Tallahassee Taloofa was a village in this area, identified on 18th Century maps (under a variety of spellings including Tallahassi Taloofa and Tallahassa Talofa). Taloofa/Talofa is a Creek-Seminole word for town, tribe or settlement, and presumably emphasizes the old fields meaning of Tallahassee: i.e. Old Fields Town, as opposed to Old Town Town.The Apalachee Indians occupied the area between the Aucilla and Ochlockonee rivers, present-day Leon and Jefferson counties, for more than five centuries. In the mid-1600s, they began living in missions with Spanish priests and soldiers. The largest group of Apalachees, nearly 1,000, lived at Tallahassee’s Mission San Luis from 1656 to 1704.In 1703-1704, the missions were destroyed by British and Creek forces, as part of Queen Anne’s War between England and Spain. The Apalachee and Spanish abandoned and burned Mission San Luis in 1704 to thwart a similar attack.The Apalachees scattered to St. Augustine, Savannah, Pensacola and Mobile. Today, their last remnants survive in a small band in Louisiana.In the 1700s, when Seminole Indians began to move into the deserted area, they found large swaths of land that had been cleared by the Apalachee for planting corn, squash and beans, which the Seminoles used for their own planting. And in 1767, a British map identified the general area of today’s Tallahassee as “The Old Fields.”The first reference to the Tallahassee name also appeared on that 1767 map, where a village on the west side of Lake Jackson was listed as “Tallahassa” or “Tonaby’s Town.” Subsequent British maps in 1770 and 1778 also placed “Tonaby’s Town in the “Old Fields” region – co-identifying it as “Tallahassee Taloofa.”Tonaby was a Seminole chief, who aided the Spanish against the British during the American Revolution. In 1770, Tonaby’s Town was described as having “36 houses, a square, 16 families, 30 gunmen and a head man named Tonaby.”
Exactly where Tonaby’s village was is a source of speculation.
The late Tallahassee historian Cliff Paisley believed it was in the Dellview Street/Charter Oak Drive neighborhood off North Monroe Street, near today’s Northwood Centre – arguably near the 1767 map location at Lake Jackson.The late Florida state archaeologist Calvin Jones believed it was probably near Myers Park, not far from the site he discovered in 1987 of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto’s winter encampment of 1539-40.Others have placed Tonaby’s Town/Tallahassee Taloofa everywhere from Mission San Luis to present-day downtown Tallahassee to Lake Lafayette a few miles east of the city. Descriptions of the location of Tonaby’s Town/Tallahassee Taloofa are imprecise and lack modern landmarks.The issue is further clouded by the fact subsequent bands of Seminoles who moved into Leon County adopted the name Tallahassee for their villages – one of which may have been on the exact site of Tonaby’s Town. Or not. Seminoles frequently moved their villages seeking better land and resources.In 1823, when attorney John Lee Williams and physician William Simmons were sent by Gov. William DuVal to choose a site for the new capital of Florida, they found two villages in the area named Tallahassee: Old Tallahassee, led by Chief Chefixico, and New Tallahassee, led by Chief Neamathla. Old Tallahassee, which reportedly included descendants of Tonaby’s original clan, was located on the south side of Lake Lafayette, with New Tallahassee described as “two miles above the lake.”
In any event, by the time of Tallahassee’s founding, the area was clearly known as Tallahassee.The choice of the name for the Florida territorial capital is generally credited to Octavia Walton, the 14-year-old daughter of territorial secretary, George Walton (who chose the site of the Meridian Marker, in current day Cascades Park, from which all surveys in Florida are measured). Octavia Walton is said to have chosen the name Tallahassee for its long association with the natives of the area, though one account says she chose the name for its “sun town” meaning.The Legislature formally adopted the name Dec. 11, 1824 near the end of its first session in Tallahassee.Nearly two centuries later, it remains a good choice.
Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2018 following a stroke. The Tallahassee Democrat is publishing columns capturing Tallahassee’s history from Ensley’s vast archives each Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of theTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Hail Tallahassee! A better name than Tonaby’s Town
