Biohazard Cleanup Near Shell Island St. Marks, FL

St. Marks, officially the City of St. Marks and known in Spanish as San Marcos de Apalache, is a small city in Wakulla County on Apalachee Bay in Florida's Big Bend, about 20 miles south of Tallahassee in the Tallahassee metropolitan area.

St. Marks began as a Spanish settlement in 1679 centered on the fort of San Marcos de Apalache, and as a port on the Gulf of Mexico it is one of the oldest settlements in Florida.

In the late 18th century St. Marks hosted a trading post of Panton, Leslie & Company, and in its heyday it served as the seaport for all of Middle Florida and lower Georgia.

In 1818, during his incursion into Spanish Florida, Andrew Jackson had British nationals Robert Chrystie Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot executed at the old fort, an incident that nearly embroiled the United States in an international crisis.

The fort site is preserved today as San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park, where the Wakulla River and the St. Marks River meet.

A railroad often cited as Florida's first, the Tallahassee Railroad, was built around 1836 to link the territorial capital with the port of St. Marks and hauled Central Florida cotton to the ships there until the Civil War.

That abandoned rail line is now the Tallahassee-St. Marks Historic Railroad State Trail, a paved trail of about 16 miles that ends at the St. Marks waterfront.

The St. Marks Light lighthouse, built around 1830 partly from limestone the Spanish had quarried locally in the 1730s, stands at the mouth of the St. Marks River about six miles from town and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The lighthouse stands within the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches across Wakulla, Jefferson and Taylor counties.

Despite its centuries of history, the modern City of St. Marks was not incorporated until 1963.