The British controlled Florida from 1763 to 1783, encompassing the entire American Revolution. Florida remained loyal to England and King George III throughout the conflict.

The last naval battle of the American Revolution took place off of Cape Canaveral on March 10, 1783. Two American ships, the Alliance and the Duc de Lauzun, were on a mission to bring 72,000 Spanish silver dollars from Cuba to the American colonies to pay the Continental soldiers.

The American ships were intercepted by three British ships, the Alarm, the Sybil, and the Tobago at Cape Canaveral.

“I think in my article I refer to it as a two-ship treasure fleet on a secret mission to secure funding to pay the American soldiers that had been pretty much languishing for almost two years without pay in upstate New York and other places throughout the colonies,” says Brevard County Historical Commissioner Molly Thomas, who has written a series of three articles about the battle for the most recent issues of the Indian River Journal.

As the American ships carrying much needed funds for the Continental Army met with the British ships determined to stop them, one ship from each side took the lead in battle.

“Basically, you had two ships sailing north, and you had three ships sailing south,” says Thomas. “The ships heading north were the Americans, and the three sailing south were the British. Only the Alliance and the Sybil really engaged. The other two (British ships) the Tobago and the Alarm kind of lingered back a little bit, and didn’t get involved in the fight. The Duc de Lauzun just did its best to stay out of it because it couldn’t keep up with any of them.”

The HMS Sybil was under the command of James Vashon, and the USS Alliance was under the command of John Barry.

Vashon had received intelligence that the Duc de Lauzun was carrying money from Cuba. It was also the weaker of the two American ships, having removed most of her cannons and ammunition to lighten the load, to try to be faster.

“The Sybil started to go after the Duc,” says Thomas.

Barry saw an opportunity to position the Alliance between the Sybil and the Duc de Lauzun.

“So that’s when the actual fight started.”

Robert Morris of the Continental Congress was the mastermind of the secret plan to bring Spanish money from Cuba to fund the American Revolution. His plan led to the last naval battle of the war.

“He was the chief financier for a lot of things to do with the military and he was also what they called the Agent of Marine, which is basically like the Secretary of the Navy now,” says Thomas. “He was a self-made shipping mogul, so he had a lot of connections both in buying and selling ships. He actually purchased the Duc de Lauzun himself, and he also had a lot of access just in networking with people in other ports. So he was able to coordinate them going down to Havana to secure this money from a French financier.”

Ironically, the Treaty of Paris was signed more than a month before the last naval battle of the American Revolution occurred. No one in the Americas knew that the war was over, because word had not yet arrived from Europe. That knowledge may not have stopped the secret mission to Cuba, because America really needed the money.

“The Battle of Yorktown had already happened,” says Thomas. “Everything had stopped for the most part as far as hostilities went, but they wouldn’t disband the army. Despite all the many letters that George Washington had written, they refused to disband it because they didn’t actually believe that they were going to come to any terms. So, for that two year window after Yorktown and then this battle, the soldiers were not paid. They didn’t have the money to pay them.”

The Americans won the last naval battle of the American Revolution, and the mission to bring funds back from Cuba was successful.

Following the war, Florida would return to Spanish control in 1783, until becoming a United States Territory in 1821. Florida became a state in 1845.

On Sunday, October 29, hundreds of people gathered at the Cocoa-Rockledge Garden Club to wish George “Speedy” Harrell a happy 90^th birthday. The venue was full all afternoon as family and friends came and went to the “open house” style event that featured refreshments, a slide show of images featuring Harrell, and, of course, birthday cake.

Harrell was seated in a rocking chair at the center of the room, greeting a steady stream of well-wishers.

While his actual birthday is September 28, Harrell decided to postpone his birthday celebration so that relatives from Texas could join the festivities.

“Speedy” Harrell was born on River Road in Rockledge, and has lived in Central Brevard County his entire life. He remembers a time before DDT was developed as an insecticide. He says that if you put your hand on a window screen on the shady side of a house, it took only a few seconds for the mosquitos to form a solid black mirror of your hand as they attempted to bite you through the wire mesh. Everyone had window screens, because there was no air conditioning.

Harrell graduated from Rockledge High School in 1945, with thirty-two classmates. He remembers using a “mosquito beater” to keep the blood suckers off of his mother as she put laundry on the line to dry, and to protect his brother as he milked a cow. Florida pioneers like the Harrell family would lash together palm fronds to create “mosquito beaters” to brush away swarms of the biting insects.

In 1986, when George “Speedy” Harrell decided to organize an annual gathering for people who lived in Brevard County prior to 1950, he chose to name the group Mosquito Beaters. Harrell says, “I thought it would be great if we had one day that we get together, not a funeral or a wedding.”

Every year, about 1,000 people attend the Mosquito Beaters Annual Gathering. The event is so popular that local high school class reunion activities are planned to coincide with it. There are no formal presentations or academic discussions. The gathering is just a large group of friends and family coming together to remember old times and talk about the way it used to be in East Central Florida.

Harrell was only 14 years old when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He was too young to serve in the military immediately after Pearl Harbor, instead earning the nickname “Speedy” playing football as a high school freshman. He remembers everybody making sacrifices during wartime.

“The rationing of everything was set up to conserve what we had,” says Harrell. “Gasoline was rationed weekly based on need. I was a growing boy with big feet, and would have to go to the Rationing Board and explain that I needed a new pair of shoes to get it. Tires for your automobile, you had to go before the Rationing Board and show that you needed a new tire.”

Harrell turned 18 before the war ended, and was sent to serve the U.S. Army in Germany. That was the only time he lived outside of Brevard County.

In the 1950s, the population of Brevard County exploded.

While the Mosquito Beaters was originally formed for people who had lived in Brevard County prior to 1950, that requirement has relaxed in recent years. Harrell explains, “If we stayed with ‘before 1950’ they’d all be dead and I’d be there talking to myself.” He says that now anyone is welcome to attend the gathering, “if they don’t tell us how they done it back home.”

In addition to founding the Mosquito Beaters, Harrell started the Space Coast Post Card Collectors Club, and the Florida State Knife Collectors Club. He has co-authored four books on Central Brevard County and the St. Johns River.

The Mosquito Beaters have an office in the Library of Florida History on Brevard Avenue in Cocoa, where their collection of photographs and documents is held. The building was originally a 1939 WPA-era post office, where Harrell worked as a postman before his retirement in 1982 as a Post Office Superintendent in Brevard County. Now, he can be found there almost every day, working as a volunteer.

There’s something distinctly Floridian about watching shrimp boats trawling our coastal waters, particularly in the northeastern part of the state. Shrimping and shrimp boat building have been an important part of the culture of St. Augustine and Fernandina Beach for more than a century.

“Mike Salvador was a fisherman, he was a mariner, he was an entrepreneur,” says maritime historian Brendan Burke, co-author of the book “Shrimp Boat City: 100 Years of Catching Shrimp and Building Boats in St. Augustine, the Nation’s Oldest Port.” “In Fernandina in the first decade of the twentieth century, he assembled what I would consider to be the greatest maritime chapter in Florida’s state history.”

The shrimping industry that Salvador helped to established involved thousands of people. Families from diverse cultural backgrounds were part of the birth and growth of Florida’s shrimping industry in the early to mid-twentieth century.

“You have African American families that that are getting into the enterprise in fish houses, as labor on the boats, and as owners of some of the boats,” Burke says. “You have Greek immigrant families that are building boats, mostly in Fernandina and St. Augustine but other places as well, like Tarpon Springs. You have Italian immigrant families that are coming either directly from Italy or transmigrating from places up north like the Fulton Fish Market in New York.”

New York’s Fulton Fish Market was an integral part of Florida’s shrimping industry, distributing the tons of shrimp being caught in Florida waters to restaurants and dinner tables around the world. The shrimp would make it to the market via the railroad and the growing interstate road system.

There was a “boom” in Florida’s shrimping industry in the 1940s and ‘50s as the population of the state increased dramatically after World War II, and demand for shrimp increased.

“Shrimp were mostly an ethnic food prior to the 1920s, ‘30s, and 40s,” says Burke. “Maybe you would have heard of a shrimp cocktail in the big cities, but if you’re in Omaha, or if you’re in Des Moines, or if you’re in Topeka, you probably didn’t eat shrimp habitually. After the war, you had all these young men and women who traveled around the country, around the world, and they’d met other people and they learned to do strange things like eat shrimp. The war changed us in many ways, but it changed what we put on our plates. St. Augustine and a lot of other port towns, started to supply that need.”

Gradually the emphasis in St. Augustine shifted from catching shrimp to building the boats to do it. In the mid-twentieth century, shrimp boats left St. Augustine for richer fishing grounds in Louisiana, southwest Florida, Mexico, and elsewhere.

“What stayed in St. Augustine was the ability to build the boats that supplied the fleets,” says Burke. “Between 1919 and 1985, I can account for about thirty-five hundred boats that were built in town that went all over the place. We built boats for 23 countries around the world. We shipped them out almost by the dozen. They were rarely built on speculation; they were a well-known quantity. That’s a legacy that Florida has left on global fishing and global foodways.”

Brendan Burke is a maritime historian with the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program. He co-wrote the book “Shrimp Boat City” with Ed Long.

“He worked in and around the industry for most of his professional life. He was in the Coast Guard, he was always on the water, always on the docks, and he saw and met and heard the people, the things, and the stories of the industry. In the 1980s he realized that he was seeing fewer people, hearing fewer stories, and seeing fewer boats. Something transformative was happening, and the industry was in decline. It was dying.”

Long and Burke started documenting the stories of St. Augustine’s shrimping industry and collected that information into a book. They also helped to create an exhibit at the St. Augustine Lighthouse Museum.

Florida’s shrimping industry still exists, but reached its peak in the 1980s.

“Today, if you put ten shrimp on a plate, only one of them will be wild caught American shrimp,” says Burke.
 

Florida Frontiers is the name of this column. It’s also the name of a public radio program, podcast, and public television series produced by the Florida Historical Society. In all its forms, Florida Frontiers celebrates the diverse history and culture of our state.

The second annual Florida Frontiers Festival will be held Saturday, October 21, from 11am to 5pm on the grounds of the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Ave., in Cocoa.

The event will feature a day of Florida music, demonstrations including Highwayman artist R.L. Lewis, vendors, food, a beer garden, and a children’s area with a “bouncy house” and games. Admission includes entrance to the museum, featuring permanent exhibits from the Ice Age to the Space Age, and the touring exhibition “Florida Before Statehood.”

Advance tickets available at FloridaFrontiersFestival.com are $15 for adults. Children 12 and under are free with a paid adult. VIP packages are $75, with amenities including complimentary food, beer, and wine in an air conditioned setting, and reserved seating in front of the stage.

The Willie Green Blues Band is headlining this year’s Florida Frontiers Festival. Green earned the 2017 Florida Heritage Award, and he has performed with blues legends including B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Robert Cray.

Green started out playing clubs in south Florida in the mid-twentieth century. Since the 1980s, he has been performing regularly at The Yearling Restaurant in Cross Creek, named after the beloved book by Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

“I play other people’s stuff, but I make it my own,” says Green. “I’m just an old time blues musician and I’m not going to change. The blues is me. I hope they like it when I play it.”

Also headlining the second annual Florida Frontiers Festival is Florida folk legend Frank Thomas, who writes and performs songs about the history, people, and places of Florida. Songs such as “Old Cracker Cowman,” “The Flatwoods of Home,” and “Spanish Gold” have earned him a loyal following. In 2013, Thomas was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

Thomas’s Florida roots run deep.

“The Thomas side of the family came into Florida in 1820,” says Thomas. “He married a girl who was born in St. Augustine in 18 and 5, and her parents was well established there, they’d been there about 20 years, so I’m thinking it had to be late 1780s or early 1790s.”

Members of the Thomas family experienced a lot of Florida history.

“Longevity seems to run in my family,” says Thomas. “My daddy was born in 18 and 82. Now he grew up in a whole different era. Now think about that. I was born in (19)43. He was 61 when I was born. His daddy died at a fairly early age. A one-eyed mule kicked him in the head. That’s what killed him. My great-granddaddy, who I sing about in the song ‘The Flatwoods of Home,’ fought in the Great War of Northern Aggression and fought in the Seminole Indian Wars.”

Thomas grew up in Middleburg, Florida, in a musical family who played gospel music. His first performing experiences were in church. His early musical influences also included performers on radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, including Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Webb Pierce.

After serving seven years in the Army in the 1960s, Thomas began touring with nationally known gospel, country, and bluegrass bands as a guitarist and singer. He played with groups including the Taylor Brothers, the Webb Family, and the Arkansas Travelers.

“I made my way back to Florida in the late (19)70s, and I met Will McLean,” says Thomas. “Will was a big inspiration for me. He encouraged me to write songs about Florida. He said ‘You know, you write all these love songs and cheatin’ songs, you don’t do much of that. Write about what you know.’ He used to tell me that it would take all of us doing all we can to tell Florida’s story. There’s so much history in the state of Florida.”

Also performing at the second annual Florida Frontiers Festival are the Native Rhythms Festival Ensemble, heritage musician Bob Lusk, acoustic rock musician Mike Garcia, and singer-songwriter Chris Kahl.

Many people are familiar with the work of writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and the historic significance of the town of Eatonville, Florida, but that was not true 30 years ago.

In 1987, the town of Eatonville celebrated its centennial as the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. That same year, community organizer N.Y. Nathiri attended a public hearing about the proposed widening of Kennedy Boulevard into a five lane road. Listening to the discussion, Nathiri realized that the project would destroy her historic hometown.

“There are three ways that you destroy a community,” says Nathiri. “You either remove a school, you remove houses of worship, or you insert a highway. The hearings were pro forma. The staff had already determined what the recommendation would be to the county. We didn’t realize that, of course. The commission hearing was very cynically placed in terms of time. The hearing was the Monday before Thanksgiving, the beginning of the holiday season, when no one is going to pay attention.”

The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community (P.E.C.), was organized to fight the destructive road project and save the historic community made famous in the books of Zora Neale Hurston, including her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” her anthropological work “Mules and Men,” and her autobiography “Dust Tracks on a Road.” The group formed a coalition with their predominately white neighbors in Maitland.

“I became a reluctant spokesperson,” says Nathiri. “I remember the late Mr. Frank Otey and other people saying ‘N.Y., P.E.C. cannot just say you don’t want the road. That’s not going to work. You’re going to have to talk about alternatives, and your alternatives can’t be emotional.’ So, immediately that meant that we were engaging with planners, with engineers, looking at the technical case for the road and why it was flawed. That was one part. The other part was [explaining] what it is that makes historic Eatonville special. If you can imagine, in 1987, the decision makers, the opinion shapers, in other words white Orange County, had not heard of Zora Neale Hurston.”

As part of a public awareness campaign, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, under the direction of N.Y. Nathiri, organized the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The event included academic panel discussions about Hurston and her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, art exhibitions, theatrical presentations, musical performances, and an outdoor festival with vendors and food. Although Hurston was not very well known in Central Florida, people around the world were familiar with her work, and came to celebrate it.

“When we organized the first festival in 1990, we had ten thousand people coming to this little community,” says Nathiri. “Those are not exaggerated figures; we literally were able to count. We had all of the names that you would want to have, the late [actress] Miss Ruby Dee, Dr. Robert Hemenway [Hurston’s] literary biographer, Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of ‘The Color Purple.’ The big thing was that ‘The Color Purple’ had become a movie, so everyone knew about it. We had also done a call for academic papers, and we had fifty-five scholars to respond.”

P.E.C. continues to present the annual ZORA! Festival during the last week of January. The organization benefits the community year-round by operating the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, the Excellence Without Excuse Computer Arts Lab, and a community garden.

It took ten years for the organization to get Eatonville designated as a National Historic District.

While Eatonville has historic significance as America’s oldest incorporated African American town, and the home of Zora Neale Hurston, the town does not have many historic structures. Joe Clark’s store from “Their Eyes Were Watching God” does not exist, and neither does the home that Hurston grew up in. This lack of historic buildings caused difficulty for Nathiri and P.E.C. at the state and national levels.

“Even though Eatonville may not have had built environment, buildings, there was a case to be made in terms of the criteria to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Nathiri’s persistence was rewarded, as the historic significance of Eatonville is widely known today.

The Florida Constitution Revision Commission (CRC) has announced that Friday, October 6, is the deadline for members of the public to submit proposals for changing our state’s constitution.

That same day, historian and author Mary E. Adkins will give a free presentation called “The Same River Twice: Florida’s 1968 Constitution from Mid-Century Draft to 2018 Revision” at 7:00 pm in the Library of Florida History, 435 Brevard Avenue, Cocoa.

“We are very grateful to the thousands of Floridians who have participated in the CRC process either by attending our public hearings or submitting their own proposed changes to the Florida Constitution,” commission chairman Carlos Beruff said on Monday. “As we review the more than 1,400 public proposals and thousands of comments and emails we have received, it is apparent that Floridians share many similar interests and ideas. In addition to directly sponsoring public proposals, many Commissioners are creating their own proposals inspired by public input and combine similar ideas into one proposal to ensure Floridians’ voices are heard. We encourage all interested Floridians who have not yet submitted their proposed changes to the Florida Constitution to send them in by the October 6 deadline.”

Mary E. Adkins is author of the book “Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution”

“Florida’s current constitution was drafted by 36 men and one woman, tweaked by the legislature, and adopted by the public in 1968,” says Adkins. “It reflected a repudiation of the so-called Pork Chop Gang, the cabal of rural Florida legislators that ran the legislature according to their self-proclaimed ‘Southern values.’ Florida had shot into the world’s limelight with the moon race and the coming of Disney World, but its obsolete 1885 Constitution hamstrung its government.”

In the late 1960s, a process was developed where Floridians would periodically be able to have direct input into how the state constitution should be updated.

“The new Constitution was responsive to the people,” Adkins says. “Never again would Florida’s citizens be beholden to the legislature for constitutional reform. The constitution provided for citizens’ initiatives and contained a provision unique in America: a periodic automatic Constitution Revision Commission.”

Florida’s current state constitution has been in place for 50 years. The new Constitution Revision Commission is accepting public suggestions for changes to the document through this week.

Adkins’s presentation Friday evening will review the making of the 1968 Florida Constitution, its 50 year history, and the issues likely to be part of the current major revision.

A variety of proposed changes to the constitution have already been submitted for consideration.

One proposal states that no candidates for governor and lieutenant governor should reside in the same county or legislative district. The proposal also includes a provision that if the candidate for governor is male, then the candidate for lieutenant governor should be female, and that “when possible,” the candidates should be of different ethnic origin.

Another proposal states that the Florida senate shall consist of 60 members from 30 senatorial districts, and that each district shall elect one male and one female representative. There is currently no rule regarding the gender of state senators.

A proposed addition to the section of the constitution dealing with the due process of law states that “No person previously found competent to stand trial shall be civilly committed upon release from incarceration when there has been no finding that such a person is no longer competent and is a danger to him or herself or others. Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the civil commitment of individuals who are genuinely incompetent and a danger to themselves or others nor shall anything in this section be construed to prevent the State from mandating lengthy prison sentences for defendants convicted of dangerous felonies.”

A list of 26 “official” symbols for the state of Florida are proposed for the new version of the constitution, including the adoption of the Ghost Orchid as state flower, the Zebra Longwing Butterfly as state insect, Key Lime Pie as state desert, and gold coins from Spanish shipwrecks as state artifact.

Public proposals suggested through Friday may be sponsored by members of the CRC at their meeting on October 17.

“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Within an hour of FDR’s speech on December 8th, 1941, Congress voted to bring the United States into World War II.

A recording of FDR’s address to Congress can be heard as you enter the “Florida Remembers World War II” exhibit, on permanent display at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee.

“Florida’s role in World War II was really transformative,” says Bruce Graetz, senior museum curator. “Florida was a relatively rural area before World War II. There was a large influx of servicemen for training during the war, industry like ship building occurred, and by the time the war was over, we’re getting into what’s considered modern Florida.”

According to government statistics, approximately 248,000 Floridians served in World War II. During the war, the population of the state exploded. Key West had 13,000 residents in 1940, and 45,000 by war’s end five years later. The population of Miami doubled to almost 325,000. Florida became an active training ground for American troops.

“Florida’s mild climate and flat terrain allowed for year round training for aviation,” says Graetz. “Camp Blanding [near Starke] is now a National Guard Camp. During World War II, it’s said that population-wise, Camp Blanding was the fourth largest city in the state.”

American troops were provided with amphibious training at Camp Gordon Johnston in Carrabelle, Florida.

“Between those two bases, the three significant U.S. Infantry divisions that went ashore at Normandy had some of their training here in Florida,” Graetz says. “In Daytona Beach, the WACS, the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, developed a training base. Noted African American educator Mary McLeod Bethune had lobbied President Roosevelt to set up a WAC training base, so from 1942 to early 1944, a large number of women trained here in Florida.”

The “Florida Remembers World War II” exhibit includes informational panels, and displays of uniforms, photographs, documents, posters, and personal artifacts.

“Camp Blanding even had a souvenir pillow case that soldiers would buy and send home to sweethearts as a token of where they were training here in Florida,” says Graetz.

More than 50,000 African Americans from Florida entered the military during World War II, primarily as Army support personnel. Some of the famous Tuskegee Airmen were from Florida.

“We’re very fortunate to have had donated for this exhibit, some of the memorabilia of James Polkinghorne, who’s from Pensacola,” says Graetz. “He was a Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot who was flying a strafing mission in Italy when his aircraft went down and he was killed. We have his training yearbook, his posthumous Purple Heart, his pilot’s file, and photographs.”

Florida’s participation in World War II went beyond serving as a training ground for soldiers. Immediately after the United States joined the war, German submarines began attacking supply ships off the coast of Florida.

“Quite a few tankers and freighters were attacked and sunk in Florida,” says Graetz. “In the early months of the war, pretty much the first seven months of 1942, civilians would see a burning tanker [from the shore] and even see a submarine surface. So it really brought the war home to Florida.”

In the 1940s, it was not uncommon to see men working in citrus groves wearing clothing marked with a “P” and “W,” indicating that they were German prisoners of war.

“They were brought back first from the North African campaigns, and some were captured submariners, and then eventually from Europe,” says Graetz. “Germans that were captured and brought to Florida were considered fortunate as opposed to Germans who were captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. They were held in bases around Florida, and they took classes in English and American Values.”

After the war, Florida’s population expanded by 46%. Many soldiers returned here with their families, or to get an education on the G.I. Bill. To accommodate the influx, the Florida State College for Women became Florida State University.

“Florida produced a booklet called ‘After Victory’ promoting Florida as a state people could move to,” Graetz says.

Texans are dealing with the aftermath of hurricane Harvey. Powerful hurricanes have impacted Floridians on multiple occasions.

The hurricane of 1928 was particularly devastating to residents of south Florida.

“When you talk about Florida, you have to talk about hurricanes,” says Eliot Kleinberg, author of the book “Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928.”

Kleinberg first heard about the hurricane of 1928 while working as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post. “In 1988, for the sixtieth anniversary of the storm, I was sent out to Belle Glade to cover a commemorative event. The more I talked to these people, I said, how is it possible that this profound hurricane happened and most of the world doesn’t know anything about it?”

The 1928 hurricane played a pivotal role in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The storm leads to tragedy for the novel’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, while she and her lover Tea Cake are living as migrant workers in the Everglades.

“People have no idea that the hurricane in Zora’s book was a real hurricane,” says Kleinberg. “She takes some literary license with the hurricane. She gives it 200 mile per hour winds and she describes a gigantic tidal wave, which isn’t exactly how it happened. It was more like a slow and steady rise, but in talking about the hurricane and its effect on black people, the migrant workers in the glades, she was spot on.”

Today, meteorologists armed with satellite imagery track every movement of a hurricane for weeks before landfall, providing multiple models of possible paths a storm might take. In 1928, storm forecasting was not as sophisticated.

“As remarkable as it is to imagine now, back then hurricanes would travel through the ocean for days before anyone knew they existed,” says Kleinberg. “In the case of this storm, a ship in the eastern Caribbean came across it, and telegraphed about the storm.”

The hurricane tore through the Caribbean islands, killing as many as 2,000 people in Puerto Rico alone. The night before the hurricane struck Florida, weather officials were saying that the storm was not going to hit the state. It made landfall near West Palm Beach on September 16.

Even if good information had been available, it might not have made a difference.

“To say that they knew or didn’t hear the hurricane warning presumes that they had a radio, which in 1928, a lot of people didn’t, and there certainly wasn’t any television,” says Kleinberg. “A newspaper is only as good as its deadline, which is 12 to 15 hours. Even if they knew, where could they go?”

The people living in isolated little towns around Lake Okeechobee had very few options as the lake swelled and flooded the surrounding area. A person would not want to head east, into the storm, and roads heading west and north were difficult to travel in good weather conditions.

“This presumes you had a car, which in 1928 wasn’t a given,” says Kleinberg. “They really, literally, had nowhere to run.”

An estimated 2,500 Floridians were killed by the 1928 hurricane, and a disproportionate number of those people were African American. After the storm, white victims and black victims were treated very differently. For health reasons, all of the bodies had to be quickly placed into mass graves.

“They took all of the white victims and they put them in a mass grave in the City Cemetery in West Palm Beach, let family members try to identify them, tag them, but 674 black victims were literally just dumped in a hole,” says Kleinberg. Black families were not given the same consideration, and many don’t know if their relatives were dumped in the mass grave or not. “The other great tragedy is that for the next 60 years, the grave was unmarked.”

The nearly 700 black victims of the hurricane were forgotten, as a road was rerouted over part of the unmarked mass grave at what is now the corner of Tamarind Avenue and 25^th Street, about two miles northwest of downtown West Palm Beach.

“If this hurricane had smashed a black tie affair in Palm Beach, they’d still be talking about it,” says Kleinberg.

The life of a soldier who fought in Florida during the Second Seminole War is chronicled in detail in the new book “The Army is My Calling: The Life and Writings of Major John Rogers Vinton, 1801-1847,” by John and Mary Lou Missall.

The married co-authors are best known for their first book, “The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict.”

“I got interested in it while I was working on my Master’s degree through California State University,” says Mary Lou Missall. “I wanted to do my thesis on some aspect of Florida history.”

Realizing that there was a lack of scholarship on the Seminole Indian Wars, Mary Lou focused her research on that series of conflicts. After graduating, she and her husband collaborated on their comprehensive first book.

“We had never been able to find a book that covered all three wars, everything in between, the politics and all of that, so we decided to write one,” says John Missall.

Together, the Missalls have also edited the books “This Miserable Pride of a Soldier: The Letters and Journals of Col. William S. Foster in the Second Seminole War,” and “This Torn Land: Poetry of the Second Seminole War.”

In addition to their non-fiction books, the Missalls have used their expertise to write works of fiction based on fact. They wrote “Elizabeth’s War: A Novel of the First Seminole War,” and “Hollow Victory: A Novel of the Second Seminole War,” which both earned the Patrick Smith Book Award.

“As part of doing research and reading up on all this stuff, the imagination gets working and you start putting yourself in these situations, and characters start coming to mind, and you write a story,” says John. “It’s also real important for us when we do write fiction, that we do our research on the historical facts,” adds Mary Lou.

For their new biography, the Missalls focus on the life of John Rogers Vinton, who entered West Point at the age of 12, and went on to serve in Florida during the long Second Seminole War.

“Vinton was a 30-year career army officer who served from the War of 1812 up until his death in the Mexican War in 1847,” says John Missall. “Most 19^th century biographies focus on the big names; the presidents, the generals, and other famous leaders, especially from the Civil War. Vinton was different. He was there in the field, doing important work, carrying out the orders of his superiors in often trying circumstances.”

It was the personal details of Vinton’s life that the Missalls found most intriguing.

“What made Vinton an excellent subject for such a study was that he left numerous journals and letters and came from a large family whose personal correspondence has also been preserved,” says Mary Lou Missall. “Through these documents we’ve been able to follow his life from the day he graduated from West Point until the day he was killed in Mexico.”

While he was a career soldier, John Rogers Vinton was also a skilled artist. The Missalls have included color plates of artwork in their book “The Army is My Calling.”

“He did take some lessons while stationed in Washington in the 1820s, and drawing was an important part of the curriculum at West Point,” says John Missall. “In the days before photography, officers stationed on the frontier were expected to be able to faithfully record the new landscapes they encountered. Still, a lot if it was natural talent, and it was something he definitely enjoyed doing.”

As the Missalls became engrossed in the life of John Vinton through his letters, military records, and art, they visited places associated with him. Buildings where Vinton lived and worked still stand in St. Augustine, Florida; Augusta, Georgia; and Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.

A small church in Pomfret, Connecticut has a memorial to Vinton.

“In that church are a set of Tiffany stained glass windows, one of them dedicated to Major John Rogers Vinton, killed in action in the Mexican War,” says Mary Lou Missall.

A state historic marker on Highway 60 near 122^nd Avenue in Indian River County marks the approximate location of Fort Vinton, which was named after Major Vinton in 1850.

About 1,000 years ago, agricultural communities were established in what would become the Southeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Mississippian culture flourished.

Keith Ashley is an archaeologist and research coordinator at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Ashley’s research is demonstrating a link between Native Floridians and the thriving Mississippian culture.

Ashley and his research are featured in the latest episode of the television series “Florida Frontiers,” airing this month on PBS affiliates throughout the state. The program is also available online at myfloridahistory.org.

“Mississippian World is a term that we’ve kind of superimposed as archaeologists,” says Ashley. “Basically these were Chieftain level groups, meaning that they had institutionalized inequality. They had chiefs who controlled more than one village. They were involved in intensive maize agriculture. They were involved in these far flung trade and exchange networks, and they had these large mound complexes with platform mounds that probably were the platforms for chiefly residence.”

On maps of the Mississippian World, peninsular Florida is excluded. New archaeological evidence uncovered by Ashley demonstrates that Native Americans living in Northeast Florida were part of an extensive trade network that extended to present day St. Louis.

“The Mississippian World’s delineating groups were intensive maize agriculturalists, and the groups here weren’t,” says Ashley. “But they were clearly involved in interaction networks and trade with them.”

In addition to growing maize, or corn, the Mississippian cultures were known for their construction of platform mounds, on which they would build houses, towns, temples, and burial buildings. The largest chiefdom of the Mississippian World was at a ceremonial complex at Cahokia, located near present day Collinsville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.

“Cahokia probably sprang up about 1000 AD, and then by about 1250 it’s in decline and by 1300 it’s gone,” says Ashley. “In its wake, what you see are a lot of other rival chiefdoms that sprout up. You see these chiefdoms rise and fall throughout the area. Sometimes they group together, other times they just break down, so it’s a really dynamic landscape.”

Ashley says that the St. Johns culture of Northeast Florida roughly coincides with the Mississippian World. The St. Johns Period begins about 500 AD, and continues until European contact, 1,000 years later.

“They’re fishers, collectors, hunters,” says Ashley. “The people in Northeastern Florida really gravitate to the Mississippian interaction network and become part of it. I think they have a resource that people in the landlocked areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri want, and that’s shell.”

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Clarence B. Moore documented significant archaeological sites in Florida. Moore did much of his work in the Jacksonville area, excavating the Grant Mound and the Shields Mound, where he uncovered some intriguing artifacts. Some of the artifacts were made with copper, mica, galena, and other minerals common in the Mississippian World, but not Florida.

Ashley believes that these artifacts, including a pair of copper ear decorations found by Moore at the Grant Mound, help to prove contact between Florida natives and other Native Americans who were very distant geographically.

“These small little ear pieces maybe a couple of inches in size, look like a face,” says Ashley. “They would have had a long nose pultruding from them. So far, we’ve only found seven complete pairs of those in copper in the entire United States, and all of them, we believe, are manufactured at Cahokia.”

Ashley has expanded on the information gathered by Moore, discovering distinctive pottery and other artifacts that further support the idea of Native Floridians interacting with distant neighbors to the north.

“We found a small little point called a Cahokia Point near Shields Mound,” Ashley says. “We had archaeologists from Cahokia look at it, and they told us that, yes, this is a Cahokia point, and it looked like any point that they would find at Cahokia.”

In between the St. Johns culture Indians and the Mississippian Indians, was a pocket of hunter gatherers who also had contact with Northeast Florida residents about 1,000 years ago.

Chemical analysis of distinctive pottery found near Jacksonville shows that some comes from central Georgia, while the design was also adopted by Native Floridians.