Florida's lost fort

There's not much to see at the site of old Fort Drane, other than some large oak trees on a grassy hill. Its wooden walls, which once sheltered the largest Army force in Florida, were burned to the ground by Seminole warriors more than 150 years ago. No historic marker identifies the fort site today, and for that matter, the state government never has determined just where it was. This much is known, however: Thousands of troops were stationed here, about 20 miles northwest of Ocala, during the fort's brief history, including one general who became governor of Florida and another who ran for president. In the sweltering conditions of a frontier outpost, soldiers died here of yellow fever and malaria, in fierce battles with Seminole warriors, in quarrels between regular Army troops and volunteers, and by suicide. One despondent commanding officer killed himself here by thrusting a sword through his right eye into his brain.

This also is known: Most of the men who died at Fort Drane are still buried at the site, somewhere on the land owned by a company mining its clay soil to make kitty litter.

That worries people who consider the site historically significant. Members of the Marion County Historical Society say they would hate to see American soldiers' graves disturbed by the bulldozers of a cat litter manufacturer. The Florida Historical Society has expressed its concern in more muted terms, adopting a resolution opposing "the attempts of certain parties to destroy and physically abuse the site of historic Fort Drane in northwestern Marion County ..."

But so far, Mid-Florida Mining Inc. itself has shown more interest in locating and preserving the site than the state of Florida has. Company officials say their mining equipment has not touched the fort site or anyone's grave, and to make sure it won't, they are asking an archaeologist to identify the site.

The problem is, "we don't know where Fort Drane is," said Whit Palmer, the company's principal owner.

To Joe Knetsch, a state research historian who has written about Fort Drane, the ownership of a historic site by a kitty litter manufacturer is just one example of how little regard Florida has shown for its own past.

A high school and college history teacher in Florida for 20 years, Knetsch said this inattention to history begins in school. To be a social studies teacher in Florida, "you do not have to take a single course in Florida history, or a course in Florida government," he said, and high school history texts, after identifying St. Augustine as the nation's oldest city, rarely mention Florida again.

For example, "How much have you heard about the Second Seminole War?" he asked.

It lasted seven years, cost more money and took more soldiers' lives than any other war against an American tribe, and was very unpopular, particularly among Northerners who saw it as a plantation owners' war against a tribe that gave refuge to escaped slaves, he said. "A rather important war that gets almost no mention in any major history text."

It was during this war that Fort Drane was built on the plantation of Duncan Clinch, a general who owned slaves and a sugar mill on the Florida frontier.

State's history is missing, too

In Pinellas County there is a town named Seminole and a high school named Osceola. Florida State University has a Seminole mascot, and descendants of the Seminole tribe are known today for sponsoring big-jackpot bingo games on Florida reservation lands.

What else do today's children learn about the tribe that once controlled much of Florida and fought three wars in a vain effort to stop European settlers from taking this land?

Not much, judging from their history books, and what they do learn of their state's past is rather colorless.

"In terms of Florida history, I just don't think there's much there at all," said Ray Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida.

In Pinellas, for example, high schools do not offer a course in Florida history. The students' thousand-page American history text devotes one sentence to "the costly Second Seminole War," attributing its origin to the tribe's refusal to move west.

In the middle schools, many students get no exposure after the sixth grade to Florida's history. One text used by some middle schools does contain a brief summary of the Seminole wars. It describes the Seminoles as a powerful tribe who increased their strength by absorbing other tribes and taking in fugitive slaves, and who fought wars against a federal government determined to resettle them in Oklahoma.

The longest of these wars, the text says, began with the Seminole massacre of Maj. Francis L. Dade and his troops in December 1835 as they marched from Tampa Bay to Fort King, now Ocala.

The text does not mention an event six months before the massacre that a Works Progress Administration history of Florida describes as "at once typical of the shortsighted bungling of the whites and fateful for the course of the oncoming war." According to this history, Seminole leader Osceola came to Fort King with his wife. While he was making purchases at a store nearby, she was seized as a slave. He appealed to Wiley Thompson, the Indian agent at the fort, who refused to intercede because the mother of Osceola's wife had Negro blood. When Osceola objected angrily to this decision, Thompson put him in irons until he agreed to leave Florida upon his release. Instead he stayed for revenge. On the same day as the Dade massacre, Osceola and a band of followers ambushed Thompson outside the fort and scalped him.

A base for attacks

What part did Fort Drane play in the ensuing seven-year war?

According to Knetsch's research, it was erected in December 1835 and abandoned in January 1837, yet during its brief occupation, it was central to some of the war's most important events.

The fort was erected about 40 miles northeast of the mouth of the Withlacoochee River, possibly for logistical reasons, possibly to protect the Lang Syne plantation of Gen. Clinch from Seminole attacks. Its 12-foot fence enclosed an area not much larger than a baseball field, yet served as a wartime home of more than 3,000 soldiers and settlers. It became a base for attacks on Seminole forces at the Withlacoochee, a hospital for wounded and dying soldiers and a target for raids by the Seminoles, who stole horses, took some of Gen. Clinch's slaves and burned his sugar mill to the ground.

Within the fort, one historian wrote, "sand flies and mosquitoes were innumerable ... centipedes, cockroaches, scorpions, with immense spiders, were daily tenants of the place, and at night we were surrounded by myriads of wolves who kept up a continual yelling." By the summer of 1836, one-third of the troops had malaria. Disease finally drove the Army from the fort. The Seminoles came, burned it down, destroyed the plantation and occupied the fort site. They in turn were driven out, and the fort site was occupied briefly by a band of Tennessee volunteers and Creek warriors who were enemies of the Seminoles. When they left, the Florida wilderness returned.

Today the site lies near the manicured hills and rail fences of a string of horse farms. Historians and souvenir hunters say a variety of artifacts have been found here, from military buttons to archaic arrowheads believed to be thousands of years old.

Martin Palmer, the manager of Mid-Florida Mining and son of the owner, thinks he has found remnants of the old fort. He believes it lies on a hilltop in an area the company has leased for grazing, a good quarter-mile from the spot where bulldozers are clawing 60-foot holes in the ground.

He pointed to a spot at the base of an old oak tree, where soil has been scraped away to reveal a pit lined with handmade red bricks, and predicted the buried remains of the fort's fence posts will be found nearby. The company is asking an archaeologist to confirm the location, "just to kind of put the whole thing to rest," he said.

A Florida native, Martin Palmer went through school without ever hearing of Fort Drane, so he is somewhat puzzled by the local interest in preserving it. Mid-Florida Mining has owned the site since 1977, and "nobody from the state has ever wanted to spend the time or effort to find that fort," he said.

Still, the company does not want or need to mine in the area where soldiers and Seminoles once fought and died, he said. "We don't want to ever disturb this fort," he said.

Hopes of historians

Alyce Tincher fears the state will leave the site in the hands of a mining company. A former president of the Marion County Historical Society, she has spent seven years researching the history of Fort Drane and the men who lived and died there. In hushed tones, she talks about how awful it would be if their graves were unearthed by a bulldozer.

She and other members of the historical society think the Fort Drane site should be turned into a state park, with a museum and exhibits, maybe even a rebuilt fort. Its historic significance is undisputable, she said. "It was the largest fort during the Seminole War. It had the most people quartered there."

State research historian Joe Knetsch has somewhat humbler hopes for the site. "It's far too late to recreate a fort, but some kind of exhibit should be set up, because so many soldiers and Indians died here," he said.

To date, the state has shown little interest in owning Fort Drane, however. It is not a well-known site; even some state historians have trouble recalling its place in the Seminole wars. A state archaeologist came to inspect the site a few months ago, but he left without finding the fort. There was a proposal to acquire the site several years ago, but that was unanimously rejected by a state committee, Knetsch said, and "the Department of State generally has the attitude that they don't need any more Second Seminole War forts."

George Percy, director of the department's Division of Historic Resources, said the Fort Drane site has archaeological value, and "I think it should be protected. I don't know if the state should own it."

For now, it is up to the folks at a mining company to protect what remains of Fort Drane. It is the promise of Mid-Florida Mining, and not the state of Florida, that you'll never find a little piece of state history in a bag of kitty litter.