The building now known as Fort Dallas and situated at 400 N.W. Third Street in Lummus Park is the second oldest manmade structure in Dade County.  Only the Cape Florida lighthouse is older.  The original site of the building was on the north bank of the Miami River near present S.E. Second Avenue. A lot of history had taken place at this site before our building was built: the land had been granted to James Egan by Spain, Florida had passed to the United States, Egan had sold the property to Richard Fitzpatrick, originally of South Carolina, to be used as a plantation, and the plantation had been abandoned and neglected during the Second Seminole War, During that war Fort Dallas was established at the mouth of the Miami River but the fort consisted only of wooden buildings and tents.

When Fitzpatrick saw the poor condition of his plantation following the war he sold it to his nephew, William T. English who laid out a town, which he called the Village of Miami.  Nothing came of the town but in the late 1840’s English began to put the plantation into shape. He borrowed several slaves, all skilled stone masons, from his sister in South Carolina and they laid up native stone to form the walls of two buildings; a two-story mansion house, and another building (our building) 95 by 17 feet, to be used as slave quarters. The stonework was completed for both buildings but they were still roofless when English went off to California to join the gold rush and was accidentally killed.  In 1855 the Seminole War broke out again – the Third Seminole War – and the army returned to the site of the former Fort Dallas, finished the two stone buildings and occupied them, the officers in the mansion, the soldiers in the slave quarters which became known as the Barracks.

 From the Civil War until Julia Tuttle bought the property there was usually a representative of the absentee landowners at the “fort”: serving longest was J.W. Ewan who lived in the house and ran a store in one room of the Barracks, rented another room to the county government as the Dade County courthouse, and permitted transients to stay in the other rooms – a kind of crude frontier hotel.

 When Julia Tuttle bought the entire property of 644 acres in 1891 she moved into the mansion and used the Barracks for storage and as a temporary barn for her cow.  She soon repaired the old building and after her lifetime it was made into a residence and rented to tourists and at one time became a tearoom.

 During the Boom of the “Twenties” the land was sold for a hotel site but the Barracks was saved from destruction by members of the Everglades Chapter, National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Miami Woman’s Club who together raised $7,000 to have the building removed and reconstructed in Lummus Park. It was moved stone by stone and its integrity preserved, truly Miami’s most historic building. Today through an arrangement with the City of Miami the building is the meeting place of Everglades Chapter and a museum for relics of the American Revolution.

 Three markers have been placed by Everglades Chapter to commemorate the old fort: one at the original site and two near the building in Lummus Park.

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