In 1757 no vessel could approach the coast of St. Augustine without running the risk of being taken by the French privateers. It has not always been the home of Spanish Dons and guitar-playing, as in 1777. Captain Rory McIntosh, the Don Quixote of the country, lived here, and paraded the streets in true Scottish style, dressed in the Highland costume. His home was with Mr. Archibald Lundy, then a merchant of St. Augustine. He was present at the taking of Fort Moosa, under command of General Oglethorpe, and mentions his share in the fight with characteristic bravado: "I am a scoundrel, sir! At Fort Moosa a captain of Spanish Grenadiers was charging at the head of his company, and, like a varmint, sir, I lay in the bushes and shot the gallant fellow." On June 17, 1821, the American flag first floated from Castle San Marco. A meeting was afterward held in the governor's palace, where the exercising of a right was declared which had banished the Huguenots from the soil centuries before: "Freedom to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience." The archives of St. Augustine were said to have been delivered to the United States Collector. They were sealed in eleven strong boxes, for the purpose of being sent to Cuba, but detained by Captain Hanhan, and afterward forwarded to Washington. Dr. McWhir, an Irish Presbyterian preacher, visited Florida in 1823 and 1824, preaching at St. Augustine and Mandarin. He organized the first Presbyterian Church in the State, located at Mandarin. It was also mainly through his influence that the Church in St. Augustine was founded. In 1834 St. Augustine answered to the following description: "Situated like a rustic village, with its white houses peeping from among the clustered boughs and golden fruit of the favorite tree, beneath whose shade the invalid cooled his fevered brow and imbibed health from the fragrant air." It was, indeed, a forest of sturdy orange-trees, whose rich foliage of deep green, variegated with golden fruit, in which the buildings of the city were embowered, and whose fragrance filled the body of the surrounding atmosphere so as to attract the attention of those passing by in ships at sea, and whose delicious fruit was the great staple of export. The plaza then contained many orange-trees, one of which was over a century old, producing, in a single season, twelve thousand oranges--more than eight thousand being nothing unusual for many of the trees in a year. However, in 1835 there came a change over the dreams of these independent, happy people, when their source of income was gone in a single night--a calamity caused by a cold, heartless invader from the North, King Frost, which made them a brief visit, and froze the trees to the ground. From an income of more than seventy thousand dollars per annum, the amount was decreased to nothing. Their trees, being well matured, had produced an average of five hundred oranges annually.