African American Masonic Temple

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area south of Pack Square was the center of the black business district, complete with doctors, lawyers, restaurants, a drug store, boarding house, library, and the Young Men's Institute. Brick buildings ...

Unearthing Florida: Santa Maria de Galve

For the people who lived at Pensacola’s first permanent Spanish colonial settlement, isolated on the frontier, religion provided them with the means to cope with harsh conditions.

Like Santa Maria de Galve, each settlement had churches and cemeteries, and priests, who ...

Unearthing Florida: Nuestra de Soledad

Human burials under the floor of a catholic church in St. Augustine highlight the dramatic cultural shifts that occurred there centuries ago.

I’m Dr. Judy Bense, and this is Unearthing Florida…

Originally built by the Spanish sometime shortly after 1572, the chapel ...

Pack Square

The public square has been a central feature of Asheville since the town's creation in 1797. The county court ordered that lands for a public square be procured in the "most convenient and interesting" place. Lying at the intersection of ...

Unearthing Florida: Nombre de Dios

In 2011 archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History uncovered an extraordinary find- the possible ruins of the oldest stone church in the state.

Originally built in 1677, the church at the Spanish mission of Nombre de Dios in St. ...

Unearthing Florida: Bureau of Archaeological Research

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the artifacts that archaeologists unearth in Florida?

The State of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, or BAR, in Tallahassee has a wonderful conservation lab and collections facility. This is where the artifacts found ...

Unearthing Florida: Newnan's Lake Canoes

When lakes dry up, amazing things are sometimes brought to light; such was the case at Newnan’s Lake, where ancient canoes were exposed.

2000 was a very dry year, and as Florida’s lakes and sinkholes shrank, sunken water craft were revealed. ...

Arcade Building (Grove Arcade)

Dr. Edwin Wiley Grove envisioned the Arcade Building, built between 1926 and 1929, as a massive commercial mall with covered pedestrian thoroughfares and rooftop terraces surmounted by a skyscraper tower. It was the most ambitious project conceived by Grove, a ...

Church of St. Lawrence

Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908), an architect and builder of Spanish origin, came to Asheville to work on the Biltmore House in the mid-1890s. After completing his work at Biltmore, Guastavino settled in nearby Black Mountain. He soon declared the city needed ...

Battery Park Hotel

The 14-story Battery Park Hotel stands as an architectural and historic monument to Asheville's tourism and development boom of the 1920s. The hotel was erected in 1924 by Edwin W. Grove "as a capstone of his excavation and leveling of ...