Pilaklikaha, established in 1813 by Black Seminoles one mile east of here, was the largest and most prosperous Black Seminole town in Florida, with a population of 100 men, women, and children. Its name meant "many ponds" in the Mikasuki language. Many Black Seminoles were formerly enslaved people of African descent who fled bondage to Spanish Florida after the American Revolution and, after being driven into the Alachua and Suwannee regions by Georgia and Tennessee militias, joined and mingled with the native Seminoles. Though not formally adopted into the Seminole Tribe, they formed a relationship with native Seminoles, who protected them from slave catchers in exchange for military aid and a portion of their crops as tribute. At its peak, Pilaklikaha had timber, thatch-and-daub homes, corn cribs, and fences, and its residents may have owned few possessions beyond simple dishes, arms, beads, and hand-made brushed pottery. In the 1820s, American officials Horatio Dexter and Lt. George McCall visited and reported herds of cattle and horses along with fields of rice, beans, melons, pumpkins, and peanuts. Pilaklikaha was also known as Abraham's Old Town, after Abraham, who escaped slavery in Pensacola around 1826 and became a skilled interpreter, the voice of the Seminoles in treaty negotiations with the United States government, and counselor to Chief Micanopy, even accompanying him to Washington, D.C. Assuming a connection to the Dade Massacre in 1835, United States Army soldiers under Brigadier General Abraham Eustis burned Pilaklikaha on March 30, 1836, during the second escalation of the Seminole War, but all of the town's residents had escaped weeks earlier. During the conflict, many native Seminoles and some Black Seminoles, including Abraham, were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma as part of the Trail of Tears, and Abraham died there sometime after 1870.