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Every summer, Americans across the nation celebrate Juneteenth, the annual June 19 holiday that commemorates the official end of slavery in the U.S. On that day in 1865, Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce President Abraham Lincoln s Emancipation Proclamation, the document signed two years earlier that freed the nation s enslaved people. But in Florida, the date of May 20, 1865, might hold even more significance. One month before Granger made it to Galveston, Union Brigadier Gen. Edward M. McCook stopped in Tallahassee to make a similar announcement. Down the street from the state Capitol at the Hagner House (today the Knott House Museum), McCook declared that all Black people were now free citizens of the United States. The news which, before the days of mass media and the invention of the telephone, came as a surprise to many was toasted at a celebratory picnic at Tallahassee s Bull s Pond by those who d been enslaved. ....