Was the first European settlement in the Gulf States located in Wilcox County, Alabama?

Tristan de Luna lands at Pensacola, Florida.

Was the first ever European settlement in the Gulf States located within the confines of present-day Wilcox County?

Many of you will remember from grade school that the oldest continuously occupied European settlement within the borders of the continental United States is St. Augustine, in northeastern Florida, which was founded by the Spanish in 1565. However, according to “Alabama Encyclopedia, Vol. 1: Book of Facts,” the Spaniards actually established a settlement in Wilcox County five years before that, in 1560.

For those of you interested in this unusual bit of trivia, here’s what the “Alabama Encyclopedia” had to say about it – “On Boykin’s Ridge, on Pine Barren Creek, near its influx into the Alabama River, was a Mobillian town, Nanipacna. This town was the successor to Maubila, which was destroyed by DeSoto in 1540. In April 1560, the Tristan de Luna expedition established a colony of several hundred persons here. Although the colony was short lived, it was the first European settlement in the Gulf States. The town was shown on De Crenay’s map of 1733. The name means ‘Top of the Hill.’”

This interesting paragraph seemed to yield up more questions than answers. Why did the famous Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna decide to establish a colony at Nanipacna in the first place? Why was it short lived? Where exactly was it located? Did these “several hundred persons” leave anything behind?

With those questions in mind, I turned to a book called “Dead Towns of Alabama” by W. Stuart Harris. In that book, under the entry for Nanipacna, the author noted that this Indian town was located on the east side of the Alabama River, in the northern section of present-day Wilcox County. It went on to say that the “ill-fated” De Luna expedition “reached this town, found it deserted, but discovered there a large supply of corn, beans and other needed provisions.”

The town’s Indian inhabitants fled into the woods a few minutes before the Spaniards arrived, but soon came back and welcomed the Spanish. “Much to the Indians’ regret, the uninvited guests showed no inclination to leave, and the food supply soon vanished, forcing all the people to search for wild food during the winter in order to survive.”

Other sources I found indicated that most of the Spaniards left Nanipacna, which is a Choctaw word, in late June 1560, and most of them had returned to Pensacola by November of that year due to lack of food.

My trusty copy of the “Alabama Atlas & Gazetteer” indicates that Pine Barren Creek enters the Alabama River a few miles northeast of the Boykin community, which is almost due north of Camden.

As hard as it is to believe, Spanish explorers were living in this area 457 years ago, which was years before any European colony was established anywhere else within the confines of not only Alabama, but also Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. What these explorers would think about Alabama and those other states today is hard to predict, but one thing can be said for sure, much has changed in our part of the world during the past four and a half centuries.