Tag Archives: Fort Caroline

The Myth of Ancient Floridian Giants

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The fiction that the Timucua and other indigenous Florida peoples were seven to nine feet tall spread rapidly in the 1950s. My mother believed it, told me we were descended. Another fiction. Willie Browne and Father Dearing believed it. D.B. McKay — Tampa mayor, newspaper editor, and chief organizer of the White Municipal Party — believed nine foot tall ancient Floridians populated the Garden of Eden. So where did these ideas come from?

New Story: Round Marsh (by the Willie Browne Trail)

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People have theorized Round Marsh the result of a meteor, others that it’s the remains of a British rice paddy and a 4,000 year old cypress pond. Willie Browne led friends on hikes around the pond and archaeologists have combed its shores. The World War II airplane and its pilot, meanwhile, are still in the marshes to the north. Willie Browne often said he could hear “the thunder of horsemen racing by in the distance,” when no one was there.

50 Years Ago, Willie Browne Died

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This week marks 50 years since Willie Browne died. The hermit was famous in his own time, but his gift of hundreds of acres to The Nature Conservancy has made him a kind of conservationist saint. If you visited his cabin in what’s now the Theodore Roosevelt Area of the Timucuan Preserve, he always knew when you’d stepped onto his land.

Remembering Craig Morris

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In praise of Craig Morris, who passed away on September 22nd. Craig spent his career here at the 46,000 acre Timucuan Preserve. This place had called him. He’d never forgotten the vision. When he was a child, having just moved into a Fort Caroline subdivision, he went for a walk and saw “human bones by the hundreds eroding out of the bluff.” He honored them his whole life.

Gilmore Settlement and Homes Built into Burial Mounds

I try not to wince at the street sign that warns me this road’s a “dead end.” It dead-ends at Grant Mound.

When UNF archaeologists and students were able to scan the Petherbridge site after bulldozing, they “found thousands of pieces of pottery, and pieces of human remains”.

French colonial artist Jacques Le Moyne called them “hermaphrodites.” 

New Story: Death and Life of a Spanish American War Fort

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The guns never fired. Behind concrete parapets, the two eight foot long, 16-ton “rifles” peered over the bluff, waiting for the Spanish ships to take the St. Johns River into Jacksonville.

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Perhaps the spirits they believed haunted these grounds and witnessed walking up from munitions tunnels were the ghosts of their virginities.

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