Long before the first propeller turned, this bluff was strategic real estate. In 1559, Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna founded a colony on nearby Santa Rosa Island. The Spanish built the wooden Fort San Carlos de Austria on these bluffs in 1697. The French destroyed it when they captured Pensacola in 1719. The British took over in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. Spain recaptured Pensacola in 1781 during the American Revolution and completed Fort San Carlos de Barrancas in 1797 -- barranca being the Spanish word for bluff, the very terrain feature that made this location worth fighting over. Andrew Jackson took Pensacola in November 1814 during the War of 1812. Spain finally ceded Florida to the United States in 1821 under the Adams-Onis Treaty, and the navy yard was established four years later.

The navy yard's early years reveal an uncomfortable truth. Skilled workers refused to stay in Pensacola. Yellow fever and malaria killed with grim regularity. Naval Constructor Samuel Keep wrote to his brother in 1826, "I shall not remain here unless I am obliged to do so." The first commandant, Captain Lewis Warrington, turned to enslaved labor, arguing that Black laborers "suit this climate better, are less liable to change, more easily controlled." By May 1829, 37 of the yard's 87 workers were enslaved. By 1855, the payroll listed 155 slaves. Scholar Ernest Dibble concluded that the military was "the most important single influence to the spread of the slaveocracy in Pensacola." The yard's first labor strike occurred on March 14, 1827 -- by the free workers, protesting wages and hours. Enslaved labor continued until the Civil War.

Naval aviation arrived in January 1914, and Pensacola has owned it ever since. When America entered World War I in April 1917, this was still the only naval air station in the country, with 38 aviators and 54 aircraft. By armistice in November 1918, the base had trained 1,000 naval aviators, its beach lined with hangars stretching a mile along the shore. During World War II, it produced 1,100 cadets a month. Senator Owen Brewster declared the growth of naval aviation "one of the wonders of the modern world." Pensacola aviators trained the Doolittle Raiders at nearby Eglin Field in 1942 for their carrier takeoffs in B-25 Mitchell bombers. During the Korean War, it produced 6,000 aviators in just three years. Today, 131 aircraft operate from Forrest Sherman Field, generating 110,000 flight operations annually.

The Blue Angels call NAS Pensacola home, flying their F/A-18 Super Hornets from the same field named for Admiral Forrest P. Sherman. The National Naval Aviation Museum sits on base, as does Fort Barrancas, restored and opened to the public after decades of neglect. Roger Staubach, the Heisman Trophy winner and future Dallas Cowboys quarterback, played for the base's Goshawks football team in 1967 and 1968 while fulfilling his Navy service obligation. In 2006, construction crews rebuilding a rescue swimmer school destroyed by Hurricane Ivan unearthed something unexpected: the remains of a Spanish ship, possibly dating to the mid-sixteenth century. At NAS Pensacola, you only have to dig a few feet to find another century.

The Pensacola Naval Complex today employs more than 16,000 military and 7,400 civilian personnel across Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. It hosts the Naval Education and Training Command, the Naval Air Technical Training Center, and a German Air Force training squadron. Every naval aviator and naval flight officer in the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard begins their training here, alongside combat systems officers from the Air Force. Hurricane Ivan nearly ended it all in 2004, damaging nearly every building on the installation. The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure review came and went, and Pensacola survived. The buildings were rebuilt. The mission continued. It is, after all, what this bluff has always done.