"This is my home." Top 5 Page for this destination Tallahassee by XanderDone

Well, this is the place I was born in, and aside from the fact that I'm leaving in less than six months, it seems that the less amount of time that I have left here, the more beautiful this city tends to get. Maybe I'm maturing, but I think that as I get older, I think that all the amorous qualities of this city vividly awakened. I wouldn't think that these days I come to find certain characteristics of Tallahassee that bring opportune moments for photography. The weather is clear; when it needs be, it rains. However so much that the rains come, it is purely magical what it does to your soul. There are many beauties of Tallahassee. You just have to know where to look for them. It wasn't until I knew that I was leaving this place when I realized all that this city has to offer. Now that I've come to the realization, I'm destined to make a really great Tallahassee travel page for people to see what took me too many years to discover.

Dolphin fountain at the base of the New Capitol

Andrew Jackson wanted to make a capital for the new territory of Florida way back when. In doing so, he hired two horsemen to ride on horseback on what became a 20-day expedition, one going east from St. Augustine and the other going west from Pensacola (the two lead a disputed vote for capital.. the first of a history of disputed elections). Where they meet is where they would build the capital, which discribes its geographical location. Back then, anything below Alachua County was swampland and was very hard to build on and actually have a town with a steady population due to all the diseases from mosquitoes and everything else. It happened to be that where they met was also near the location of an old abandoned Appalachee town (Tallahassee is Appalachee for "old town" or "abandoned fields." The capitol is, as you know, on the top of a hill. This isn't the first one. There were two before the Old Capitol that weren't nearly as ornate, and weren't even in the same location. The first one was a weak little shack log cabin that was incompleted due to lack of funding, the second was a two-story house looking building. They weren't in the same place because there was a waterfall where the New Capitol is now. Tallahassee was founded on the principle of the waterfall being the central focus. It came from a natural spring that is now being incredibly polluted, as it's been re-routed to the canal bisecting Franklin Rd. After that took place, they build the Old Capitol, which looks much different than it does today. Think of it as the same building without the dome and with a brick exterior. In 1891, they put the white exterior on and repainted it and placed a small cupola and plumbing were added. In 1902, the dome was installed and two enlargements to the wings were built to support a larger state government. Since the capital was still being disputed, the state government issued a grant to build the New Capitol in 1977, and it's not been contested ever since.

N Monroe Street past the capitol

Over the summer I worked in the office of the County Commissioners, and this was a part of my daily walk to the parking garage after work in the mornings. Beautiful blue skies like in this picture are very typical of Tallahassee; especially if the meteorologists say that it is going to rain. Since we're near the coast, it is relatively difficult to predict Tallahassee weather, but most of the time it is beautiful.

The city used to be a place for outlaws; dueling was very popular until the TPD was founded and rich farmers moved in and started heavy plantation farming. By the time of the Civil War, the only major battle fought was one just south of Tallahassee in St. Marks after it was over already. The only capital west of the Mississippi River to not have been captured by the Union, Tallahassee's plantations were dismantled and turned into hunting lodges for the rich Northerners in the winter. By the 1950s, there was a more diverse population of a little over 25,000 or so people. Now with over 225,000 people, Tallahassee's urban population is growing at a slower pace than the rural part of the city surrounding it, which is in contesting for annexing to contribute to the growth of the city. I live in Bradfordville, a town on the border of the Tallahassee limits which will probably be annexed into the city in the next five years at its rate of growth.

• Pros:Canopy roads, friendly drivers, state capital
• Cons:Not much to do for teens short of seeing a movie or an arcade
• In a nutshell:It may not be much, but its beauty lures you.