Providence is believed to be Florida's second oldest settlement after St. Augustine. A statement found by the Lonnie Summers family in the Old Odem House after they purchased it in 1936 said that shortly after St. Augustine was founded in 1565, a small band of soldiers settled in Providence. Hernando De Soto's army passed near the village in 1539 on its trip to west Florida. A Spanish mission, Catalina De Ajomica, four miles southeast of Providence, was built by Franciscan missionaries in the early 1600's to evangelize Timucuan Indians and was destroyed by English soldiers and their Indian allies in 1702. Daniel Stewart had a plantation here in 1790 where he grew Sea Island cotton, and orange groves produced abundantly. Families from Georgia and South Carolina settled here before 1830, with the greatest influx between 1850 and 1860. During the Seminole Indian Wars from 1835 to 1842, settlers were attacked by Indians and sought refuge at Fort Call on the Santa Fe River, Fort Ward on Olustee Creek, and Fort No. 15 East Florida on Swift Creek, all within a four-mile radius of Providence. Eleven known Indian War veterans and forty-six Civil War veterans are buried in area cemeteries. Providence was a prosperous, thriving community before and after the Civil War and was the first county seat of all the land now comprising Columbia, Bradford, and Union counties. A post office opened in 1854 and operated intermittently until 1906, with James L. Turner as postmaster and John D. Harden and Willie Thomas as mail carriers. Physicians here included Doctors Coon, Davis, Lamb, Maines, Newsom, Powell, Tison, Wachope, and Witt; Doctors Newsom and Powell owned drugstores, and L. G. Ware was a druggist. William W. Willis was a lawyer and judge. Providence also had a bank, photographer Jeremiah Mobley, butcher R.D. Kierce, barber V.J. Valentine, the Odom cotton gin, the Shelley and Ware sawmill, John Fralick's grist mill, J.H. Walters's private school, and general mercantile stores operated by S.D. Hodges, James L. Turner, Odom and Weeks, and Lonnie Driggers. General Charles P. Summerall, an early resident, became Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army when General John J. Pershing retired in 1924 and later became president of The Citadel. Old Providence Baptist Church, two miles northwest of Providence, was founded in 1833, making it the oldest Baptist church in Union County and one of the oldest Baptist churches in Florida.