Joseph Purcell’s 1778 and 1779 surveys lay outside the Florida peninsula

Joseph Purcell’s two surveys of 1778 and 1779 did not cover any ground within the future Highlands County, and neither records an Indigenous account or trade route through the south-central peninsula.[boyd-1938][tna-florida-56]

The 1778 road survey

The first of the two is A Map of the Road from Pensacola in Wt. Florida to St. Augustine in East Florida, From a Survey made by order of the late Hon. Col. John Stuart Esq., drawn by Purcell in 1778 and preserved among the Colonial Office maps as CO 700/Florida 54.[purcell-1778-road-map][unc-rla-pro-co700] As the title states, the survey followed a single overland route between the two provincial capitals, running west to east across the top of the Floridas.

The Florida historian Mark F. Boyd, who published the map with nine plates in the Florida Historical Quarterly in 1938, described it as the outstanding available account of the interior “of western and much of northern Florida” in the British colonial period, valuable both for its topography and for its descriptive legend.[boyd-1938] That scope can be checked against the map itself, a photographic facsimile of which is held as Map 1778 P7 in the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia.[hargrett-1778-p7]

Purcell wrote his findings onto the map in a panel headed “General Remarks”, divided into notes on rivers, creeks and paths; on the lands and soil; on the old fields; on the swamp lands; and on “the Indian Towns called Semenolas or Wild People, being Collonies from the Muscogees alias Creek Nation”.[hargrett-1778-p7] The six Seminole towns he set down all lie in the Florida panhandle and the lower Chattahoochee and Flint valleys: Chanachatte or Red Ground on the west bank of the Chattahoochee, whose head man he named as Cochee, “the Bully”; Yomally on the west side of the Apalachicola; Hyhappo Savadnah four and a half miles below it on the same river; Oklafanee Ceaspar on the east side of the Flint; the old-field town of Tallahassa Talcofa at the head of the Wet River of Appalatchi, ten miles north of Fort St. Marks; and Micasucky at the head of the Ocklockonee.[hargrett-1778-p7] The paths he recorded run between the same northern places — Fort Picolata to St. Augustine, the St. Pedro path at the forks of the Spilly River, the Harmonia path to Micasucky, and the route from the head of Santa Rosa Bay to Chanachatte.[hargrett-1778-p7] Purcell closed the list with the limit of his own knowledge: “Besides the above Towns there are Villages and others I did not visit.”[hargrett-1778-p7]

Neither the towns nor the paths reach the south-central peninsula, and no informant named on the map spoke for the country that became Highlands County.[hargrett-1778-p7]

The 1779 Choctaw boundary survey

Purcell’s second survey of these years was made still further from Florida’s peninsula. Certified at Pensacola on 24 June 1779, it is a two-sheet Map of the Boundary Line of the Lands ceded to His Majesty by the Chactaw Indians, from the north boundary of West Florida on the Yazo River to the River Pasca Ocoola, drawn at a scale of one and a quarter miles to the inch and held as CO 700/Florida 56.[tna-florida-56][unc-rla-pro-co700] The Yazoo and Pascagoula rivers both lie in what is now the state of Mississippi. The survey was a boundary-marking exercise in the western part of British West Florida, and it concerned Choctaw territory rather than any nation or route in the peninsula.

What this means for Highlands County

No Indigenous account of the country between the Kissimmee River and the Lake Wales Ridge, and no trade route through it, appears in either survey, because neither survey went there. The same is true of Purcell’s earlier compilation for Stuart, the 1775 Map of the Southern Indian District of North America, which assembled Indian towns and trade paths across the Southeast but carried its detail no further south than the latitude of Tampa Bay and Lake George; that map and the wider blank are treated in Eighteenth-century colonial cartography and the absence of Highlands County place-names.

Among British surveyors of the period, only Bernard Romans left a written record of the ridge country and of what Creek travelers and a Spanish pilot told him about the interior lakes, as set out in Indigenous interior accounts and Lake Wales Ridge topography in the survey texts of Bernard Romans and William Gerard De Brahm.

Related

• Eighteenth-century colonial cartography and the absence of Highlands County place-names
• Indigenous interior accounts and Lake Wales Ridge topography in the survey texts of Bernard Romans and William Gerard De Brahm
• Earliest cartographic appearance of Lake Istokpoga and the Kissimmee River

References

• purcell-1778-road-map — Joseph Purcell. A Map of the Road from Pensacola in Wt. Florida to St. Augustine in East Florida, From a Survey made by order of the late Hon. Col. John Stuart Esq. 1778. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/102279320
• boyd-1938 — Mark F. Boyd. A Map of the Road from Pensacola to St. Augustine, 1778 (with nine plates). 1938. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol17/iss1/4/
• tna-florida-56 — The National Archives (United Kingdom), Colonial Office. Map of the Boundary Line of the Lands ceded to His Majesty by the Chactaw Indians, from the north boundary of West Florida on the Yazo River to the River Pasca Ocoola (CO 700/FLORIDA56). 24 June 1779. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3477664
• unc-rla-pro-co700 — Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina. Early Maps of the American South: Colonial Office Map Collections (PRO CO 700). 7 September 2026. https://rla.unc.edu/emas/PRO-CO700.html
• hargrett-1778-p7 — Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina. Photographic facsimile of Purcell’s 1778 Pensacola–St. Augustine road map, Hargrett Library Map 1778 P7, in Early Maps of the American South: Collections of the Hargrett Library, University of Georgia. 1778. https://rla.unc.edu/Mapfiles/Hargrett/hmap1778p7.DjVu.jpg

Where this comes from

Evidence

corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.

Review

unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.

Rights

society

Sources

1. Joseph Purcell, A Map of the Road from Pensacola in Wt. Florida to St. Augustine in East Florida, From a Survey made by order of the late Hon. Col. John Stuart Esq. (1778) · archival
2. Mark F. Boyd, A Map of the Road from Pensacola to St. Augustine, 1778 (with nine plates) (1938) · secondary
3. The National Archives (United Kingdom), Colonial Office, Map of the Boundary Line of the Lands ceded to His Majesty by the Chactaw Indians, from the north boundary of West Florida on the Yazo River to the River Pasca Ocoola (CO 700/FLORIDA56) (1779) · archival
4. Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Early Maps of the American South: Colonial Office Map Collections (PRO CO 700) (2026) · secondary
5. Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Photographic facsimile of Purcell's 1778 Pensacola–St. Augustine road map, Hargrett Library Map 1778 P7, in Early Maps of the American South: Collections of the Hargrett Library, University of Georgia (1778) · archival

Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.

Have a question about this record?Ask A.P.

← Back to collection