Downtown Bartow has a small park most people walk through without stopping. A Fort Blount Florida historical marker stands there, the only trace left of the settlement that came before the town had its current name. In October 1851, Redding Blount led twenty-one settlers, including his own sons and their families, to a bend in
Site of Fort Blount: The Name Bartow, Florida Erased Read More »
A quiet marker stands in Polk County today. A Fort Meade Florida historical marker is all that remains of the original 1849 outpost. Most drivers pass it without slowing down. It reads simply: Site of Fort Meade. Beneath that, a story most Florida history books skip entirely. In 1849, a young Army lieutenant named George
The Florida Fort One General Built and Another Would Later Serve Read More »
Tucked into a quiet corner of Wildwood Cemetery in Bartow, Florida, one gravestone stands out. Row 28, second from the wall, near a large tree. The stone reads simply: Charlie Smith, July 4, 1842, October 5, 1979, America’s Oldest Man. If that birth date is accurate, Charlie Smith lived to be 137 years old. We
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This is the story of the St. Augustine Monster, and the century it took to explain it. Two boys were bicycling along Anastasia Island on the evening of November 30, 1896, when they found something that shouldn’t have been there. A gray mass, half buried in the sand, bigger than anything either of them had
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We stood at the edge of Mosaic Peace River Park and looked at water. Brown, slow, ordinary water. Nothing about it hints at what used to rise from the ground a mile north of here. Nothing marks the absence except a sign. That’s the strange part about Kissengen Spring. There’s no crater. No dry basin
Kissengen Spring: The Florida Spring Lost Forever in 1950 Read More »
We drive FL-60 between Bartow and Mulberry more than we’d like to admit. Every time, the same hills rise up out of flat land that has no business having hills at all. They’re not hills. They’re phosphate mining Florida left behind, stacked higher than most buildings in this county We never thought much of it.
The Hills Along FL-60 Read More »
We found this one by accident. No warning, no reputation, no ghost story attached to it. Just a green space on a map, sixty acres, less than ten minutes from historic downtown Ocala. We almost drove past it. We shouldn’t have. Ocala Wetland Recharge Park sits sixty acres wide, less than ten minutes from downtown.
The Park That Keeps Trying to Heal Itself Read More »
We stood in the old Orange County Courthouse’s restored courtroom. Dark wood pews. A judge’s bench flanked by an American flag and a Florida flag. A mural overhead, two robed figures, and a line of text carved into the molding above them: EQUAL AND EXACT JUSTICE TO ALL MEN. It felt like the kind of
A Trial That Never Touched This Room Read More »
State Road 76 runs flat along the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, past sugarcane fields and long stretches of nothing. Most drivers never slow down here. Then, without warning, a small brick gate appears on the right, easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. We were looking. We pulled off and walked in.
Port Mayaca Cemetery: The Grave Beneath the Grass Read More »
The Building That Wouldn’t Stay Down Arcadia burned first. A year before the Heard Opera House ever opened its doors, fire tore through downtown and took nearly every wooden building with it. When construction finished in 1906, the Heard was the first structure to rise from the ash. A bank downstairs. A theater upstairs. A
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