Overview
Brevard’s
Space Coast was established in
1855 when it inherited the 1844 boundaries
of old St. Lucie County,
an area originally
encompassing 7000 square
miles, Florida's largest political subdivision.
A boundless land of oaks, palms and pines flanked by a clean,
pristine lagoon, the county was largely without claim or improvement at
the time of its creation.
Two decades earlier, U.S. troops had pushed the
remaining native Americans off the land and into the seclusion of south
Florida. The Armed Occupation
Act brought
in a handful of settlers around Fort Pierce
in
the 1840s, but after a few years most had abandoned the area, fearing
renegade Seminole Indians.
Some had caught "gold
fever"
and sought claims in the expanding western territories.
Without a population, old Brevard inherited no roads and the only
substantial improvements in the area were a scanty dragoon trail leading
to Fort Pierce and
the small canal at the Haulover, part of Orange and later Volusia County
until 1879.
The shallow Ulamay
Lagoon
of the ancient Ais,
proclaimed Banana River by Mills Burnham
in
the 1840s, continued to be shown by mapmakers as the "East
Channel." Because of a
dependence on waterway transportation, Merritt Island
was clearly seen as an island, bordered on the north by Banana Creek.
Along its flanks, the lagoons were packed with unknown and
"inexhaustible" forms of marine life, free of net and hook, just
as described by James Gadsden
in
his 1824 survey of the new territory's east coast.
Early residents traveled almost exclusively by boat. They knew the
lagoon was no river but the historic misnomer, Indian River, was not
dishonored. Indeed, from the
1850s until the 1950s, the whole region was known far and wide as the Indian
River Country, and became known to invalids for its healthy climate
and to wealthy sportsmen for its abundance of fish and game.
Without roads or convenient inlets, the area
remained almost uninhabited until after the Civil War. Prior to the war,
the residents were few and far between: the Burnhams, Dummetts, Russells,
Houstons, Carliles, Smiths, Feasters, Wilsons, Simmons and a scattering of
cattlemen and farmers around a few inland settlements.
Forgotten for centuries, shipwrecked gold,
diamonds, silver, and Chinese porcelain lay buried near the
present-day McLarty Museum south of Sebastian
Inlet.
Dozens of mysterious burial mounds and shell middens dotted the
landscape between the lagoon and the St. Johns River. But before the mound-builders and even before the
lagoon had fully formed, native Americans had made old Brevard their home.
For endless centuries, Melbourne Man, Vero Man, and the Windover people
stepped softly through a verdant world of natural rhythms and the land
remained nature's domain. Only
within the last few thousand years did the small native population begin
to accumulate a record of their long existence.
Their only faux pas,
garbage middens of refuse shell and bone, would become valued as campsites
by European hunters and later prized as the perfect road-building
material by early county commissioners.
By 1900 much of the U.S. had already been
transformed by man's inventions: fire, irrigation canals, and steam-driven machinery.
But the industrial revolution bypassed Brevard. Overlooked in a
world of change until the dawn of the twentieth century, the county
finally welcomed the developers and speculators riding the iron horse in
search of new land and opportunity. Suddenly, intensive fishing and
hunting, new roads and ditches, drainage canals, lands cleared and
fertilized for agriculture, experiments with exotic
plants,
and the dredging for inlets, causeways, parks, and mosquito control
caused
indelible alterations to the environment.
In the relatively brief 50 years between 1900 and 1950, the
seemingly timeless balance of the county's ecosystems had been tipped to
serve man. The county's
resources begged for respect and intelligent management during the post
war boom.
However, increasing restrictions seemed to encroach
on fundamental rights. New
game laws made criminals of Florida's old crackers.
Hunting and fishing, first necessity, then sport, were Florida's
oldest business and the American way of life in the 1800s.
The survival skills of hunting in the Florida woods were passed
from father to son. Early laws encouraged the practice, creating bounties on
certain animals. An 1832
Territorial Act awarded a bounty for the destruction of any "wolf,
bear, tiger, or panther." In
1841 the Council specifically targeted wolves in an "Act To Encourage
The Destroying of Wolves," which paid citizens four dollars per
scalp. The Florida black
wolf, once a subspecies of the red wolf, is now extinct.
Charles Pierce tells
of the Indian River Country in the 1870s and 80s, when "it was the
height of every would-be-hunter's ambition to kill a deer and
among the boys...this feat was the crowning glory of their young
lives."
Even so, by 1900 the county realized that the free-for-all was over. Since the mid-1890s, manatee captures
were allowed only in the interest of science and only with a county
permit. Other restrictions
followed in the county that unknowingly held the highest diversity of
marine life in North America, starting with President Roosevelt
's
dedication of the nation's first wildlife sanctuary. Three-acre Pelican Island
became
that sanctuary in 1903. The event seemed to symbolize the end of old
Brevard and the beginning of a new era--the story of man's sudden impact
on the timeless cycles of nature.
It is often asked, "Why is today's Brevard so
long and unwieldy? Why is the county seat
so
far north?" The answer is Indian River.
It was the lengthy lagoon that was the heart of the Indian River
Country. The narrow fishery provided food for the ancients and the later
pioneers. It harbored,
protected, and cooled the first communities along the western shore. It
supported rich hammock land for the developing orange industry and served
as an avenue for communication, supplies, and northbound
produce that funneled through Titusville.
Since
1855, the county gradually lost the bulk of its less populated
western and southern territories that once included the areas of today's
St. Lucie, Okeechobee, martin, Indian River and parts of Highlands, Palm
Beach and Polk counties. But these were given up without much
concern. Separated b y the ocean prairie, marsh and river, the last
western Brevardians struggled to organize their County of Osceola in 1887.
The split significantly narrowed the county and it has since been committed
to the old Indian River country, the original heart of old Brevard that we
know today as Brevard county.
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-----------------------------------------
Early
Space Coast
The shelly dunes of Brevard
County ramble along a splintered remnant of the ancient continent of
Gondwanaland. The existence of this former land will be affirmed on no map,
although its turf is well-grounded
in scientific theory. Far
below the high ridges of central Florida lie sandstone and marine fossils
that form the prehistoric cornerstone of Florida. Across the Atlantic,
northwestern Africa rests on the same rock.
Once common ground, the early Florida and African bedrock were
split roughly 245 million years before present (MYBP) when Gondwanaland
began
to break up and drift south. The
shifting land divided the super continent of Pangaea and gave birth to the
Atlantic Ocean.
As the continents divided, a small sliver of the
African mass lingered. About
25 million years later (220 MYBP) this remnant became established as
Florida's underwater peninsula, fusing with the primeval American
continent along Georgia's "Brunswick gravity anomaly."
Geologists have shown that early Florida rock and its fossil record
bear more resemblance to African geological history than to that of North
America.
Florida remained submerged during the next 195
million years while Pangaea continued to divide along the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Dinosaurs
and other reptilians evolved without interruption, carried by the shifting
crustal plates. Then
suddenly, most of the largest reptiles disappeared, allowing mammals to
gain prominence around 65 MYBP. One
of the earliest mammals to inhabit underwater Brevard was the sea cow.
The existence of this manatee-like creature, Protosiren,
has been detected from carbonate deposits of 45 MYBP.
First Land
About 25 million years ago, a
narrow central Florida peninsula emerged to support plant and animal life
that already existed on the North American continent.
Brevard was a shallow ocean floor at this point until the last ice
age helped to lower sea levels. Freezing
ice caps gradually drew water from Brevard's flooded terrain. As recently
as 20,000 years ago, extensive polar ice caps continued to beget land,
creating a peninsula twice its current width.
Brevard's current beachfront existed as a sprawling hinterland of
scrub and marsh, miles from the highest tides.
Over the last ten thousand years, melting icecaps flooded the
peninsula and gradually produced the Brevard County coastline and lagoon
systems of today.1 Although there have been numerous ice ages
over hundreds of millions of years, the recent emergence of man during
this present activity has limited our reference to the period as the
ice age.
Early man adapted to the cold snap with a nomadic
quest for meat and warm fur. Soon the first Siberian hunters wandered into
North America. Radiocarbon dates of various ancient tools indicate that
between 40,00 and 20,000 years ago, a sporadic progression of nomad
hunters began to traverse an ancient land bridge known as Beringia.2
Named for the much-later (1728) explorations of the Dane, Vitus
Bering, the area, exposed by low seas, was once a broad chilly pasture in
the area of the present Bering Strait.
Large mammals had been crossing ice age bridges like Beringia for
millions of years.
The first Americans survived exclusively on the
huge bison, mammoth, giant sloth and similar animals.
While in pursuit of their prey, they inadvertently entered North
America. After thousands of
years of roaming, some descendants of these Asian nomads reached central
Florida.3
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Florida's First Snowbirds
Scientists
are certain that people have been in central Florida for thousands of
years, possibly as early as 12,000 years ago when the first of these
ancient nomads arrived.
Evidence indicates that the first Floridians were
not a timid people, huddling within their flimsy thatched shelters.
These aborigines spent their days tracking the dwindling megafauna
that still existed on the peninsula.
The fact that they were well-organized and efficient hunters has been offered as
a partial explanation for the many extinctions that occurred upon their
arrival in Florida. Pleistocene
overkill is the term used by archaeologists to describe early man's
organized, aggressive killing of only the largest mammals.
Science can only speculate on the other factors that contributed to
the extinction of these large beasts, such as the Pleistocene camel and
Florida's huge saber cat, smilodon.4
Since 1916 archaeologists have known about Vero Man
and other skeletal remains of early central Floridians. Many discoveries occurred during the drainage and road-building projects of the early twenties, when human
bones were found mixed with bones of extinct megafauna, such as the giant
sloth and mastodon.
One important find followed the creation of the
Crane Creek Drainage District
of
1922. Workers discovered
human bones while extending a drainage ditch west of Crane Creek. Scientists worked the site between 1923 and 1926.
What became known as Melbourne Man was their evidence that early
people lived in the area of the present Melbourne Golf Course about 6,000
years ago. Since most of
these early sites offered so little clear, undisturbed evidence, the
conclusions of researchers on "what, when, or how" involved a
fair amount of guesswork.5
Our best knowledge of some of these early people is
from an ancient burial site south of Titusville.
Located within a housing development called Windover
Farms
is a prehistoric cemetery. Due
to the decline of large grazing herds, early Floridians became more
stationary. The Windover site
is an example of some of the first permanent Brevardians. Occupied for at
least 1000 years between 8000 and 7000 years ago, the ancient cemetery was
discovered by the developer, EKS, Inc.
The site was extensively worked from 1982 through
1986 by archaeologists from Florida State University.
Dr. Glen Doran and others found that these early Brevardians did
not bury their dead in mounds as later Indians preferred. They did just the opposite.
The deceased were prepared with wrappings and placed in ponds.
Where the water was deep, stakes were used to fasten them to the
bottom. Scientists believe
the practice was unique, occurring only in central and south Florida.
For the Windover
people,
the ritual turned out to be a perfect memorial.
During the 1980s, after 75 centuries, the Windover site
yielded one of the largest and best-preserved samples of skeletal
specimens and artifacts from that age to be found in North America.
Some of the specimens contain the oldest known human cell structure
and DNA. The remains of about
172 individuals were removed from the site, many with portions of brain
tissue intact.
This archaeological bonanza also supplied
scientists with many artifacts, such as carved manatee
and
deer bones, stone knives, and the oldest and largest collection of woven
materials in the Americas.6 Tools made from manatee ribs and
sharks teeth were uncovered, indicating that these people may have hunted
and fished in the developing lagoon area to the east.
The natural abundance of their hammock home allowed them time to
develop many styles of weaving. They
also had the time to care for their disabled; spina bifida was found in
21% of one set of skeletal samples.
Researchers
also unearthed spears with points carved from chert.
Chert is a fine-grained
variety of mineral quartz, also known as flint rock.
This rock was used for axes, knives, and spear tips only, since the
bow and arrow was not yet in use. Since
chert is most commonly found in western and northern Florida, it is likely
that the Windover people
had trading partners and may have traveled inland.
While the distant ancestors of these people may have seen or hunted
the few remaining large prehistoric beasts of central Florida, Windover
men of 5500 B.C. were left with only small game along with fishing and
gathering for subsistence. The
Windover people lived in the Titusville area and used the same burial
ritual for 1000 years. Their
burial pond is now on the National Register of Historic Sites and is
protected from further disturbance.7
The Atlantic had been flooding the lowlands during
this period and as the Indian River Lagoon formed, the rising estuary
attracted diverse marine life. Soon
small Stone Age communities developed along its new shores. Without advanced tools or agricultural skills, they remained
on the fringe of the new Stone Age for thousands of years.
Probably not until about 1000 B.C. did distinct tribes develop with
skilled bowmen and not until 800 A.D. was there some dependence on crops
by inland natives.8
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The First Fishermen
During the 2500 years prior to
the arrival of Europeans, these "Indians" living near the
Mosquito and Indian River Lagoons developed into the distinct tribes of Timucua,
Ais
,
and Jeaga. Until
the early 1900s, the Brevard area was littered with dozens of their shell
middens. The middens were the remains of oysters, clams, and other seafood
that were eaten and discarded by these early people. Middens along the
eastern lagoon marked the location of long-established wintertime
villages. Numerous middens
could also be found along the upper St. Johns River.
Altogether, early archaeologists in the area between the St. Johns
and the Indian River Lagoon have discovered the remains of well over 100
middens. Burial mounds and
shell middens were the only legacy of the many centuries of Ais
occupation. But intruding
newcomers had no interest in Ais history, except to dig occasionally into
the mounds looking for treasure.
In 1766, the famous explorers John and William
Bartram did
not know who to thank when they found the only apparent dry refuge in what
is now northwest Brevard County: Baxter Mound.
The mound, a former shell midden, was only a small rocky hammock lying just above
the water. In 1838, a more
prominent midden on the western shore of Lake Winder served
to elevate Fort Taylor during the Second Seminole
Indian
War. One
of the more interesting middens, known as Gleason
Mound,
was located just east of the southern tip of Merritt Island.
The Indian Harbour midden was said to be at least fifty feet wide
and as much as eighty feet in height.
East of the midden was a long causeway passing through a lake and
wetlands to a large burial mound. Most
of these mounds and middens were removed to construct early shell roads.
Much of the material was removed between 1895 and 1920 to build the
county's main thoroughfare, designated as the Dixie
Highway in 1915.9
The most famous midden eluded the Dixie Highway
frenzy and still exists at the remote Turtle Mound exhibit
within Apollo Beach State Park in Volusia County.
Known on early maps as Sorrochos or Mount Tucker, this midden was
an important landmark for early Spanish navigators, reminding them to
steer northeast at this point. (Apollo
Beach Park is on A1A, south of New Smyrna Beach.)
Turtle Mound served
as the southern boundary of the Timucua people and the Jeaga occupied the
area south of the St. Lucie River. Between these two were the Ais. Brevard's
Indian River Lagoon, originally Rio d' Ais, was known to the first Spanish
explorers as the Province of the Ais.10
The Ais
dominated
the lagoon from Banana Creek on
north Merritt Island
to their capital town near Riomar at Vero Beach.
The capital had various names, but was commonly known as Ais.
Feared as the seat of the most powerful chief on the east coast, it
was a center of fierce resistance to the European newcomers.
No European power was able to conquer the Ais tribe.
The Spanish tried to enslave them, slaughter them, convert them,
and then cajole them with gifts. In
the end, dirty rat-infested
ships brought the only gifts the Ais could not resist: the chronic
diseases of urban Europe.
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ENDNOTES
1. David S. Webb, "Historical Biogeography," Chapter 4 in Ronald L. Myers, et. al., (eds.) Ecosystems of Florida.
70-100.
2. Brennan, Beginner's Guide to Archaeology.
3. The Random House Encyclopedia,
656-657.
4. Robin C. Brown, Florida's Fossils, 167; Robert Anderson, Florida Wilderness, 37,
57.
5. Rouse, "Vero and Melbourne Man: A Cultural and Chronological Interpretation" in The New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 12, Series 2, 1950, 220-221; Rouse, A Survey of Indian River Archeology,
153-154.
6. Glen H. Doran, et. al., "Radiometric Chronology of the Archaic Windover Archaeological Site," The Florida Anthropologist, Vol. 41, No. 3, Sept. 1988,
365-373.
7. Barbara Doran, "Discovering Florida's Ancient
Hunter-Gatherers" Florida Wildlife, Vol. 41, No. 2, Mar. 1987,
23-29.
8. Virginia P. Brown and Laurella Owens, The World of the Southern Indians, Chapter
1.
9. Rouse, 110-113, 139, 199 (A Survey of Indian River Archeology); Mr. Joe H. Wickham, personal
communication.
10. Ibid, 272. This section of Rouses's book (Indian River Archaeology) contains an article the Charles D. Higgs, "The Derrotero of Alvaro Mexia, 1605." The Ais province included all coastal and
lagoon
area from Canaveral to St. Lucie Inlet. The name "Ais" has various spellings, e.g., Ays, Ys, Is. It is thought to have been derived from the word, "issi," that the Spaniards learned from Timicuans living near St. Augustine. Issi meant "mother" and was associated with the giver of life: the river. With the Spanish article "la," it would have been "L'issi. Dropping the L, it came to be pronounced
"ah-ees."
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