Isaiah Hart
American plantation owner (1792-1861)
Isaiah David Hart (November 6, 1792 – September 4, 1861) was an American plantation owner, and the founder of Jacksonville, Florida. Originally from Georgia, Hart took up arms against Spain in the Patriot Rebellion of 1812. After moving to a location near the cow ford on the narrows of the St. Johns River, he began platting the town in 1822, and later served as postmaster, court clerk, commissioner of pilotage, judge of elections, major in the local militia during the Seminole War, and as a Whig member of the Florida Territorial Senate. The Isaiah D. Hart Bridge over the St. Johns River in Jacksonville was built in 1967 and was named after him.
Early life
Isaiah Hart's father, William Hart, a native of Pennsylvania, was a saddler by trade who moved south to Virginia and later settled in Burke County, Georgia, where Isaiah was born on November 6, 1792. In 1801, William Hart moved his family to East Florida when he received a land grant of 640 acres on Moncrief Creek and the Trout River from the Spanish governor. He and his sons Isaiah and Dan were citizens of Spanish Florida and served in the Spanish militia, but joined the so-called "Patriots of East Florida" during the Patriot War of East Florida, in which disaffected farmers and woodsmen, mostly from Georgia and led by rich planters, tried to seize control of East Florida from the Spanish in 1812. As a young man participating in Patriot raids, Isaiah Hart organized bands of marauders that raided Florida plantations for slaves and cattle, drove them northward into Georgia, and sold them.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isaiah Hart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.