Florida Parishes

The Florida Parishes, on the east side of the Mississippi River—an area also known as the Northshore or Northlake region—are eight parishes in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of Louisiana.

The Florida Parishes were part of what was known as West Florida in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Unlike most of the state, this region was not part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which applied to territory west of the Mississippi River. First settled by the French, it was ceded to Great Britain in 1763 after France's defeat in the Seven Years' War. The British exchanged it with Spain following the American Revolutionary War for territory outside North America. This area was acquired by the U.S. in 1812 and combined with the new state of Louisiana.

In terms of historical European influence, the area that became the Florida Parishes was first claimed by French colonists as part of Louisiane or French Louisiana. The French settled New Orleans, Mobile (now within Alabama), and founded numerous other settlements.

Following the French defeat in the French and Indian War, as the North American front of the Seven Years' War was known, France withdrew from North America, ceding the eastern half of French Louisiana — the land from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains, excluding New Orleans — to Great Britain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. (France had previously transferred New Orleans and its lands west of the Mississippi to Spain in the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau, although Spain did not fully take control until after the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768.) Spain also ceded Florida to Britain under the treaty.

To administer the new territory along the Gulf of Mexico, Britain divided it at the Apalachicola River into two new colonial provinces, East and West Florida. However, following the American Revolutionary War, Britain ceded its Florida territories back to Spain, but uncertainty around the territories' borders sparked the West Florida Controversy, a territorial dispute with the newly formed United States. Pinckney's Treaty of 1795 settled the initial dispute, but the sale of Louisiana by France in 1803 raised new questions about West Florida. The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso and the subsequent Treaty of Aranjuez that restored French control over Louisiana did not include Spanish West Florida, leaving the territory outside of the land acquired by the U.S. in the Louisiana Purchase.

Aggrieved by the provincial Spanish government, American and British settlers in the part of West Florida west of the Pearl River declared an independent Republic of West Florida in 1810 and elected their leader, Fulwar Skipwith, as governor. None of this short-lived Republic of West Florida lay within the boundaries of the modern U.S. state of Florida.

The flag of the Republic of West Florida, which was later identified with the Confederates' Bonnie Blue Flag of the Civil War era, continues to be flown on many public buildings in the Florida Parishes. In 2006, the state legislature designated it the "official flag of the Republic of West Florida Historic Region."

The republic was quickly and forcibly annexed by the United States, and the present-day Florida Parishes were incorporated into the Territory of Orleans, which joined the Union as the U.S. state of Louisiana in 1812. In 1810, four parishes were established in the region: East Baton Rouge, Feliciana, St. Helena, and St. Tammany.