Eighth Biennial Conference
23–25 February2018

at Mission San Luis de Apalachee in Tallahassee, Florida

Program | Travel | Lodging | Conference Map

Conference Travel

Mission San Luis de Apalachee is located at 2100 West Tennessee Street Tallahassee, just on the edge of the Florida State University campus. The FSU College of Music will be our host for the conference.

Travel Information By Auto/Rail Tallahassee, Florida's capital city, lies in the panhandle of northern Florida along Interstate 10, about 270 miles south of Atlanta. The Mission San Luis offers free public parking. The nearest Amtrak station is in Jacksonville, on the Silver Service/Palmetto/AutoTrain routes. By Air The Tallahassee International Airport (TLH) is located seven miles southwest of downtown. Cab fare from the airport to the downtown/FSU campus area is around $20–25. Please note that many of the downtown hotels, including the DoubleTree conference hotel, offer shuttle service to and from the airport. Please contact your hotel for details. The usual ride-sharing services are also an option. Other nearby airports include Panama City Beach (ECP) and Jacksonville (JAX). Both airports are a little over two hours away from Tallahassee. Jacksonville often has cheaper fares than Tallahassee.

Welcome to Tallahassee! The eighth biennial meeting of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music will take place at the restored Spanish mission site at Mission San Luis de Apalachee in Tallahassee, Florida. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a mission church and friary were constructed near the Apalachee village of Anhaica, on the edge of the modern-day Florida State University campus. The mission eventually grew into a satellite settlement for the Spanish fort and town at St. Augustine on Florida’s east coast. This thriving Spanish-Apalachee town at Mission San Luis was home to several hundred people until it was destroyed in 1704 by an English and Creek militia from South Carolina. Today, the restored mission buildings and Apalachee village are incorporated into a living history museum presenting daily village life around the year 1703. Our conference will include a tour of the mission grounds as well as a presentation on its history. In addition to learning about the history of Mission San Luis, conference attendees are encouraged to consider visiting several nearby parks and museums to learn more about Tallahassee’s nearly 15,000 years of human history. Before the mission era, this area was an important ceremonial center for the Fort Walton Culture. A complex consisting of earthwork mounds, a public plaza, and several village and residential sites dating to approximately 1050–1500 can still be explored at the Lake Jackson Mounds Archaeological State Park. The Tallahassee area may have also hosted the first Christmas celebration in the New World during the 1539–1540 winter encampment of the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto at Anhaica. Numerous archaeological finds from Anhaica and De Soto’s visit to this area are preserved at the De Soto Winter Encampment State Park near the state capitol building in downtown Tallahassee. If you are feeling especially adventurous, consider a trip to Wakulla Springs, one of the world’s largest and deepest freshwater springs. The bones of mastodons and Upper-Paleolithic artifacts can still be glimpsed in the spring bed. Daily riverboat tours along the Wakulla River provide up-close sightings of alligators and other swamp animals, as well as the filming sites for several early Tarzan films and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. While not exactly an eighteenth-century site, it is a fascinating day trip, and located only 20 miles south of Tallahassee. You may also wish to consider a two-hour drive to the wonderful oyster houses in Apalachicola, FL, or the beautiful quartz crystal beaches of St. George Island. February is a lovely time of year along Florida’s Forgotten Coast!

Things to Do Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park St. George Island Apalachicola Lake Jackson Mounds Archaeological State Park Hernando De Soto Winter Encampment There are many other possible day trips within two hours of Tallahassee. Please feel free to contact Sarah Eyerly for suggestions.

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