St. Joseph was barely three years old when it pulled off an audacious political coup. In 1838, the question of whether the Florida Territory should seek statehood divided the region sharply. The wealthier planters of Middle Florida pushed hard for admission to the Union, while settlers in East and West Florida worried that a state government would be financially unsustainable. Tallahassee, the territorial capital, seemed the logical venue for a constitutional convention, but St. Joseph's promoters lobbied aggressively and won the honor. The town had ambitions that matched its waterfront real estate - it was positioning itself as a rival to Apalachicola, the established cotton port just across the bay.

From December 3, 1838, through January 11, 1839, a group of territorial delegates assembled in St. Joseph to draft Florida's first constitution. The debates were fierce. Questions of slavery, banking regulation, and the boundaries of governmental power consumed weeks of argument in the convention hall. Territorial Governors Robert Reid and William P. Duval, Senator David Levy Yulee - who would become Florida's first U.S. Senator - and attorney Thomas Baltzell were among the figures who shaped the document. The constitution they produced would undergo four more conventions in other locations before Florida finally joined the Union in 1845, but St. Joseph holds the distinction of being the birthplace of Florida's statehood.

The town that hosted Florida's founding moment barely outlived it. Yellow fever swept through St. Joseph in successive waves, killing hundreds. A devastating hurricane struck in 1841, and a fire consumed much of what remained. By 1844, the town was abandoned - its wharves rotted, its streets empty, its grand ambitions scattered like Gulf Coast sand. The speed of St. Joseph's rise and fall is almost without parallel in American frontier history: a thriving port city of several thousand people, gone in less than a decade. The modern town of Port St. Joe, established nearby, carries only an echo of the original name.

The museum at the heart of this state park brings that lost world back to life. Inside, a reproduction of the original convention hall features life-sized, audio-animated figures of the key delegates. Visitors can hear facsimiles of Reid, Duval, Levy, and Baltzell debating the finer points of Florida's constitutional framework. Beyond the convention hall display, the museum offers glimpses of daily life in 1830s St. Joseph - a town of merchants, cotton brokers, and territorial politicians who believed they were building something permanent. The exhibits serve as a reminder that the most consequential moments in history sometimes happen in the most impermanent of places.