A touchstone to Tallahassee’s past is next to the tennis courts in Myers Park.
It is now the site of a historical marker commemorating the Apalachee city of Anhaica and the Native Americans who lived in Tallahassee at the time of European contact.
Anhaica had at one point as many as 60,000 residents, according to the language on the marker.
“Envision this whole hillside stretching down to the Capitol as a teaming, busy, massive Native American cultural and governmental center,” said Tallahassee Historical Society president Bob Holladay. “This is what was waiting here when Hernando de Soto and the Spanish got here in 1539.”
The marker is a joint collaboration between the historical society and the Panhandle Archaeological Society at Tallahassee (PAST) to celebrate the city’s bicentennial, and was unveiled at an event on Friday evening.
The Anhaica historical marker is the third of 10 the historical society is installing over the next year.
The Apalachee province was a region that stretched over the Florida Panhandle, and Anhaica was its center. The indigenous people lived in large towns with huge fields of corn, beans and squash on the perimeter, said Andrew Frank, a Florida State University professor of Native American history.