Before the annual presentation of “Mosquitos, Alligators, and Determination” begins, Lady Gail Ryan engages audience members, finding out where they are from and leading them in a high spirited “sing along” of Florida songs including “Where the Orange Blossoms Grow” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Down the Shell Road.”

“Come early,” Ryan says. “The pre-program begins the minute the audience arrives. Music will help tell about historical events with songs the audience can sing.”

The tenth annual production of “Mosquitos, Alligators, and Determination” will be held this weekend and next, with matinee performances at 2:30 pm, August 5, 6, 12, and 13 at the Library of Florida History, 435 Brevard Avenue, Cocoa. Doors will open for the pre-show at 2:00.

As founder and director of the Brevard Theatrical Ensemble, Ryan is responsible for organizing the annual presentation of “Mosquitos, Alligators, and Determination.” The production, which changes every year, features a series of vignettes portraying stories of Florida history and culture.

This year a patriotic theme will be part of the production.

“Historical storytellers must give their audience an authentic and interesting story that promotes understanding of what is happening in today’s world,” Ryan says. “I have tried to present past conflicts and events that would help the public understand today’s political fighting and see what happens when greed and division takes command.”

Some of the stories that Ryan’s troupe will be presenting this year include tales of Florida’s native people, how the Methodist Circuit Riders brought law and order to Territorial Florida, and how Hamilton Holt influenced the liberal arts tradition at Rollins College. A version of Stephen Crane’s tale of shipwreck survival as depicted in his short story “The Open Boat” will be presented. Family lore about an encounter with gangster Al Capone in Florida will be shared, and we’ll be taken to Key West in 1973.

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus ceased operation this year, and that organization has strong Florida ties.

“We’re including a tribute to the circus in our program, with music and a feeling of great gratitude for Ringling’s gift to Florida,” says Ryan.

A native Floridian born in Miami in 1929, Ryan’s energy and enthusiasm for the history and culture of our state is contagious.

“I was born right in the blast of the boom,” says Ryan. “I didn’t realize anything about anyone being poor because we raised our own vegetables. We lived in the sunshine. I washed my hair in the rain. We had the best time.”

Ryan’s parents and sister moved to Florida from Indiana, driving down in two Model “T” Fords and camping along the way. While camping just off of a shell road in Brevard County, the family was awakened by a noisy group of wild hogs. The Ryans moved on, settling in Miami.

“Our house was built from the lumber that (Henry) Flagler sold when he tore down the Royal Poinciana Hotel,” says Ryan. “If it hadn’t been for Flagler, we wouldn’t have lived in this marvelous house. We never had any termites because he had the original Florida pine.”

Although Ryan remembers her childhood in Florida fondly, she grew up with her heart set on seeing the world and performing music. She achieved her goals, getting her education in Michigan and New York, and learning to speak Italian while studying in Europe.

Ryan returned to Miami, teaching there for several decades. She earned the honorific title “Lady” from the Dade County Commission for her work organizing the Miami Renaissance Fairs.

In the mid-1980s, Ryan moved to the Space Coast. She organized the Storytellers of Brevard, which evolved into the Brevard Theatrical Ensemble.

For the past decade, BTE has been presenting a new version of “Mosquitos, Alligators, and Determination” every year. It might seem simpler to use a fixed script, but constant change is part of the production’s charm.

“Florida’s history is so complex and varied,” Ryan says. “It is, or course, all of USA’s history and important for us to know.”

Tickets for “Mosquitos, Alligators, and Determination 10” at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa are $15 each and available online at www.myfloridahistory.org. Reservations are strongly suggested, as these performances are “sold out” every year.

Beginning Saturday, July 29, the exhibition “Florida Before Statehood” will be on display at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa. The opening event begins at 2pm with a presentation by historian Ben DiBiase, director of educational resources for the Florida Historical Society.

“It covers Florida history from the Ice Age to the modern day,” says Madeline Calise, museum manager at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. “We take a look at Spanish exploration, early settlers and their challenges, the mission period of Florida, the British period, and a little bit about all the flags that Florida has flown under and the impacts that those different nations had on Florida.”

The foundation of the exhibit, including a series of informational panels and a timeline display, was created in Tallahassee.

“It is a traveling exhibit from the Museum of Florida History, so we’re really excited to have it,” says Calise. “It was created as part of the Viva Florida program in 2013, which was celebrating 500 years of Florida history, starting with 1513.”

While Ponce de Léon gave our state its name in 1513, people have been living here for more than 14,000 years. The “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit explores that history as well as European contact and occupation.

“Europeans had been living in Florida over 330 years before Florida became a state in 1845, and prior to European contact, indigenous groups had lived in the state for thousands of years,” says Ben DiBiase. “In 1565, we had the establishment of St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America, so there was generation of people living in St. Augustine before Jamestown was ever established.”

St. Augustine was established to secure Spain’s claim on Florida. In 1564, the French built Fort Caroline near Jacksonville, but the colony was wiped out by the founders of St. Augustine. The Spanish then constructed a series of missions in Florida and the American southeast.

“Moving into the eighteenth century, after the French and Indian War, the Spanish actually lost control of Florida,” says DiBiase. “Beginning in 1763, the British took control. They partitioned the territory into East and West Florida, with the Apalachicola River being the dividing line. St. Augustine was the capital of East Florida, Pensacola the capital of West Florida. In 1783, after the end of the American Revolution, the Spanish again gained control of Florida. That’s what we call the Second Spanish Period.”

By 1821, Florida was a United States Territory, gaining statehood in 1845. All of this rich and colorful history is detailed in the “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit.

In addition to the informational panels and timeline provided by the Museum of Florida History, the version of the exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science will be augmented with displays of fascinating original documents and artifacts from the Florida Historical Society archives and the Brevard Museum collections.

One of the additional objects to be displayed is a chronological history of Spanish colonization originally published in Spain in 1723.

“It’s a very Spanish perspective,” says DiBiase. “This is the original book. It’s the original binding, a leather bound book. It has the original vellum pages, some beautiful script work. This is really more a work of art now, than a historical narrative. A lot of the facts can be argued today, but what’s important is that it informed generations of Europeans who were coming over to the New World about the history of Florida.”

Other documents and artifacts that will augment the exhibit include a British map from the 1760s, Seminole Indian clothing, original papers from Territorial governor Richard Keith Call, and a set of rifles used in a duel to settle a political dispute in the 1830s.

The temporary “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit fits in well with the permanent displays at the Brevard Museum which include skeletons of Ice Age mega-fauna, artifacts of prehistoric people, displays of pioneer life, and images of outer space. There is also a Butterfly Garden and 22 acres of nature trails to explore.

The “Florida Before Statehood” exhibit is included in the regular museum admission of $9 for adults and $5 for children 4-12.

A visit to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in the rural community of Cross Creek is like a trip back in time to the 1930s. The home there is furnished just as Rawlings had it when she was writing her Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Yearling,” her autobiography “Cross Creek,” and other works depicting the lives of Florida Crackers.

Rawlings’s typewriter and notes sit on a table on the front porch, along with her ashtray and a pack of Lucky Strikes cigarettes, as if the writer has just gotten up to get a glass of iced tea from the kitchen.

Each room of the house contains furniture and personal items that belonged to Rawlings or are very similar to what the beloved Florida writer owned.

“She always described it as a rambling farmhouse,” says Carrie Todd, Park Ranger at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. “Maybe a little shabby chic is the way to talk about it. It’s white with green lattice on the bottom. It’s 3,000 square feet, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, so it’s large, but it doesn’t seem large. It seems just sort of rambling when you’re trying to go through it.”

A Fish Fry celebrating the author’s 121^st birthday will be held at the Alachua County property on Saturday, August 5^th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Tickets to the event are $8.00.

Although famous for her stories about rural life in Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was not a native. She was born in Washington, D.C., and attended college at the University of Wisconsin Madison, graduating in 1918. She lived in Louisville, Kentucky and Rochester, New York before moving to Florida with her husband Charles Rawlings in 1928.

The couple planned to support themselves with the orange trees on their property, allowing them to write in a beautiful, serene, rural setting.

“They were both writers,” says Todd. “They both were going to write novels and they thought it was going to be an easy time to make money with that citrus crop.”

Growing citrus was a lot more work than the couple had anticipated. Charles Rawlings grew tired of life in the country, and the two were divorced. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings felt a connection to her Florida land, and stayed there to write.

“Marjorie walked through the rusty old gate and immediately fell in love,” Todd says. “The book ‘Cross Creek’ she often describes as a love story to a place. But Charles Rawlings had a completely different idea about what this was going to be. He thought he was going to be a gentleman farmer. Where Marjorie saw rustic charm, he saw the lack of paint, and the lack of screens, and the lack of electricity, and the lack of running water. He hadn’t been as successful as a writer, so when Marjorie hit it big, he maybe was a little jealous.”

Rawlings first attempted to write Gothic romance novels, but could not interest publishers in her work. Literary editor Maxwell Perkins was fascinated with Rawlings’s letters and stories about her life in rural Florida, and encouraged her to write a novel about that.

“Maxwell Perkins knew that Marjorie was onto something, that she had this really great talent” says Todd. “He got her to take the notes and the little bits she had been writing down ever since she first stepped into Florida, and turn it into a book. ‘The Yearling’ particularly, but she has eight novels and 26 short stories about Florida, so she had a lot of material to work with.”

Rawlings’s most popular book, “The Yearling,” won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1939, and was made into a very successful film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman in 1946. Her 1942 autobiography “Cross Creek” was adapted for a 1983 film starring Mary Steenburgen.

In 1941, Rawlings married Norton Baskin, living in both the St. Augustine area and Cross Creek.

“He operated the Castle Warden Hotel, it’s now the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum,” says Todd. “She did live in St. Augustine with him most of the time, but came back to Cross Creek to write. She could only write here. This was really her place of inspiration.”

Renowned Florida photographer Clyde Butcher suffered a stroke on May 6, which affected his speech and coordination on his right side. Butcher’s rehabilitation is going well, and he expects to be back at work in the fall.

The black and white photographs of Clyde Butcher allow us to look at the natural Florida in a different way.

When most people think of Florida’s natural environment, an explosion of color comes to mind. We imagine multiple shades of green in a Florida swamp, bright red Poinciana trees, and the turquoise waters of the Gulf Coast. We picture the oranges, purples, pinks, and blues of the Florida sky.

“The main reason to do black and white is because the colors are so vibrant you can’t see the image,” Butcher says. “Black and white shows the oneness of nature. Without the whole system, nature doesn’t work, and I think the black and white brings a reflection of that in the work so you can actually see the landscape. You don’t just see the color.”

Butcher’s work has been compared to that of photographer Ansel Adams, best known for his black and white images of the American West. Like Adams, Butcher mostly uses a large format camera. Some of his images are as large as 6 feet by 9 feet.

“When you’re in nature you’re scanning, and you’re looking around, and you’re putting this whole scene of nature together in your mind,” Butcher says. “That’s the same feeling I want you to get looking at a photograph, is being there.”

Capturing his amazingly detailed images of Florida’s natural landscape sometimes requires that Butcher wait hours or even days for the right conditions. He’s known to stand chest high in water or lay on the ground for long periods of time to get the photograph he wants.

Much of Butcher’s work has a three-dimensional quality. Clouds, for example, often seem to be floating right out of the photograph toward the viewer. “I’ve been working with a wide-angle lens since 1960, so I’ve learned to be able to create these spaces,” Butcher says.

Many of Butcher’s photographs contain empty spaces that seem to invite the viewer in, to participate in the natural scene depicted. While some of his images are of coastal and island settings, most are focused on the Everglades. “For some reason you call it a swamp, I guess there’s some designation, but it’s actually more of a river,” Butcher says. “It’s a unique place. People don’t know what they have here. It’s gorgeous.”

Butcher’s photographs do not include people. His images seem to capture a time in Florida before humans arrived to build highways and homes.

“One of the main reasons I don’t put people in the pictures is because if someone is there, they’re taking your space,” Butcher says, adding that people’s clothing and hairstyles could “date” his photographs and he wants the images to exist outside of a particular historical period.

Butcher goes beyond preserving Florida’s natural environment in his photographs. He is an active environmentalist who brings attention to the need for conservation with his work. Butcher has created exhibits specifically to benefit the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state’s “Save Our Rivers” program, the South Florida Water Management District, and a variety of environmental groups.

In 1998, Butcher was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery is located in the heart of the Everglades, between Naples and Miami on the Tamiami Trail. His gallery and studio is in the middle of a National Park that protects the wild Florida.

From the Big Cypress Gallery, trained guides lead visitors on “Swamp Walks” through the water and trails of the Everglades, exposing them to cypress trees, alligators, exotic birds, and rare wildlife. Butcher and the guides encourage people on the walk to remain silent for five minutes, to become absorbed in the unique natural surroundings.

“People are shocked that Florida is still here. They think about Disneyworld and Orlando and Miami, and they think it’s gone,” Butcher says. “Florida’s still here, it’s just a little harder to get to.”

Butcher is featured in the latest episode of “Florida Frontiers Television,” now available online at myfloridahistory.org.

Every Fourth of July, Floridians celebrate Independence Day with cookouts, hometown parades, and of course, fireworks as America’s victory over the British in the American Revolution is commemorated.

Not all American colonists supported the war, though. Many remained dedicated to King George III and England. As the American Revolution progressed, these Loyalists became refugees and were forced to flee the colonies.

From 1763 to 1783, Florida remained under British control; so many Loyalists came here from the American colonies to the north.

On December 17, 1782, as the end of the American Revolution approached, 16 ships left Charleston, South Carolina bound for the Loyalist port of St. Augustine, Florida. The ships carried hundreds of people, civilian as well as military.

Just before the ships could make port in St. Augustine, all 16 were lost on December 31, 1782.

Chuck Meide, director of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP), was determined to find the Loyalist ships that were lost off the coast of St. Augustine in a violent New Year’s Eve storm.

“The first step is really to try to look at the old historic maps and figure out how the landscape has changed,” Meide says, adding that the St. Augustine inlet “was very notorious for being dangerous for ships and for changing a lot. Every time a storm would come, the channels would shift around. That’s why we have so many shipwrecks, because of the shoals.”

Today, modern engineering keeps the inlet in place, but historic maps show how the location of the inlet has shifted over time. Meide determined that in the late 1700s, the inlet was about 3 miles south of its present location. That’s where he decided to look for the Loyalist shipwrecks.

Meide and his team used high-tech equipment such as a magnetometer to search for objects made of metal, and a side-scan sonar that produces an acoustic image of the ocean floor.

“Basically, it’s like we’re mowing the lawn,” Meide says. “We’re going back and forth and covering an area that we feel is high probability to find shipwreck sites, and it works.”

When the equipment indicated that a shipwreck might be located at a particular spot, it was time for Meide to go diving. He says the conditions were difficult to work in because it was “black as midnight down there” and communication with the other archaeologists was impossible. “Imagine if you were doing archaeology on land, gagged and blindfolded.”

Meide was working alone in the dark water when he made the first discovery of the expedition. The magnetometer had indicated the presence of metal, so Meide was working with a ten foot pipe jetting water to clear away sand. At first he didn’t feel anything unusual. After a few times sinking the pipe “to the hilt,” Meide hit something hard.

In quick succession, Meide uncovered ballast stones that were common in colonial era sailing ships, an unidentifiable man-made iron object, and a wooden plank.

“Now my heart’s beating pretty fast,” Meide says. “The next thing I found really sealed the deal. It was another large, concreted object. It was round, it was hollow. I felt a rim and could feel inside and I realized we had a big cooking pot or a cauldron. I even felt one of the three legs on the bottom. So that suggested colonial shipwreck.”

That first series of discoveries was in August 2009, and the excavation has continued every summer since.

Subsequent discoveries helped to confirm that the shipwreck was from the colonial period, from the late 1800s, and more specifically that it was carrying British Loyalists. Meide’s team uncovered lead shot, buckles, buttons, a wine glass base, and other objects.

Perhaps the most definitive artifact found was a canon marked with the year 1780.

When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the British period was over and Florida once again became property of the Spanish. Florida became an American Territory in 1821, and was named a state in 1845.

As citizens of the United States, Floridians would celebrate Independence Day until 1861, when the state seceded from the Union. After Florida became part of the United States again in 1868, Fourth of July celebrations resumed and continue today.

The Cross-Gulf Travel Theory proposes the idea that the ancient Maya came to southwest Florida when devastating droughts occurred on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico as early as the ninth century, and that they ended up around Lake Okeechobee.

The Maya may have believed that they were following their god to Florida.

Images of the Oculate Being can be traced in ancient cultures from South America to Mexico. Different cultures separated by distance and time develop a very similar deity who is usually pictured flying, has what art historians call “goggle eyes,” and is associated with agriculture, particularly the growing of corn.

Sandra Starr, former senior researcher at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, is the first to recognize that the different ancient deities of South and Central America all share the same mythology.

“It’s always a surprise to see that the large maize corn cultures all created a deity for what kept them alive, the corn and maize,” says Starr. “Even though the cultures were sometimes thousands of miles away, they envisioned this man as a separate person, but with the same legend. That’s the astounding part.”

While the deities appear in different forms and with different names, Starr has identified visual cues that indicate that the deities share the same story.

“Most profoundly, that he appeared out of nowhere and he went away, saying he would return,” says Starr. “So there are many things that are alike. But as you can assume, the creative people in each of these cultures were either untrained or had very little to do with each other, so they used the materials that were nearest to them. Some were all stone; some were ceramic, some were almost impossible to work with. They still expressed this deity. So, of course, it took different shapes.”

The ancient Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico had sophisticated cities at places such as Chichén Itzá and Tulum, where they built stone temples that endure today. The Maya would make pilgrimages to these temples.

“You go to the temples you have built, a pyramid-like thing in most cases, to the deity of corn and maize,” Starr says. “In every case, when you follow the pilgrimage lines, and you already understand that the deity made a statement that he would return, and you are at the end of the road there in the Yucatán, and the drought was killing you all, you would, if you hypothesize yourself in the situation, you would want to find him.”

The plausibility of the Cross-Gulf Travel Theory is supported by the fact that the ancient Maya were accomplished mariners, known for constructing very large canoes.

“These were sailing vessels that could seat 25,” says Starr. “They were 8 or 9 feet across, and heavy duty, and had different bow and stern than the other types of pointed canoes. I think because of their mathematical genius, their ability to have orientation from the stars, these were ideal mariners.”

The Gulf currents could have brought the Maya to southwest Florida, and they may have ended up near Lake Okeechobee.

Starr hypothesizes that when severe drought may have driven people off the coast of the Yucatán and into the Gulf of Mexico, they would have brought gifts, and materials they would need when they reached land.

The Maya would have brought maize to grow, and archaeologist William Sears, who died in 1996, found a rare abundance of maize corn pollen at the Fort Center Archaeological Site near Lake Okeechobee. The site also contains a crescent shaped mound most closely associated with the Maya.

The crested caracara bird was important to Mayan royalty. The bird is found in South and Central America, but is not common in Florida.

“When you start to map where those birds are, I was astonished and thrilled to find that there was a whole section in the center of Florida, around Lake Okeechobee, where there are some of these crested caracaras,” says Starr. “They don’t fly much; they wouldn’t have migrated, so how did they get there?”

While the Cross-Gulf Travel Theory is not yet generally accepted as fact among anthropologists, evidence supporting the idea continues to be accumulated.

The Apollo 11 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969. Four days later, humans walked on the surface of the moon for the first time.

A team of thousands was required to make that lunar mission a success. Dr. Al Koller was a member of that team, working in the Firing Room.

“I served as the remote eyes for the top management of NASA and the stage contractors for the operations at the launch pad three miles away,” says Koller. “We did that using sixty-one video cameras, all black and white, mounted on the pad service and at all key levels of the 363 foot-tall launch tower. My job was to direct the camera crew by selecting the right cameras to keep track of the key technical work underway and to provide the best possible video views of any troubleshooting taking place.”

Koller was still in high school when his family moved to Titusville in 1958. He started working in the aerospace industry at the age of 17, when he had the opportunity to work with rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun.

“My father was involved in aviation and space from the early days, and when we moved to Florida I was in my senior year of high school, and they had a science fair,” says Koller. “I placed well in that, and out of that came a job with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which was the group that had a launch center here, essentially for von Braun’s rocket team.”

The next year, the rocket operation was transferred to NASA, and Koller along with it. After returning from college, Koller worked his way up from being a NASA technician to being a staff engineer. His 32 year career with NASA included work on both the Apollo and the Space Shuttle programs.

“I got to lead the group that wrote and published the environmental impact statement for the space shuttle at the cape,” says Koller. “We’re launching rockets from the middle of a wildlife refuge, one of the country’s largest and most diverse. I worked with a lot of really talented people.”

Prior to his retirement in 2013, Koller led the creation of SpaceTEC, the National Science Foundation’s Center for Aerospace Technical Education.

Koller is author of the new book “Exploring Space: Opening New Frontiers,” available from amazon.com. The book explores the past, present, and future space launch activities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center.

“Coming out of World War II, we were able to bring with us the remnants of the German rocket team,” says Koller. “They came to us rather than go to the Russians, and we immediately became involved in a space race with the Russians, post war. By 1948-49, our government was looking for where it would launch from. They were already launching rockets in White Sands, New Mexico, for example. They had a base in Texas, and they were looking for how you would launch big rockets.”

Cape Canaveral, Florida was selected as the launch site for America’s space program.

“In our area was the Banana River Naval Air Station, so we already had land here, government land with infrastructure in place,” says Koller. “Because we’re on the east coast of Florida, we now have launch over water for a vast area. We can go downrange for thousands of miles and not overfly land. We’re on the outside of the spaceship Earth, moving at a thousand miles an hour, so if you launch from Florida, close to the equator, and you launch to the east, you already have a thousand miles an hour of orbital velocity to work from.”

Today, independent commercial companies are partnering with the government more than ever before to move America’s space program forward.

“What they won’t do or can’t do, the government will, and what the government doesn’t have to do, they will do for us,” says Koller. “It’s a much broader program, and I think it’s about to really blossom. People like you and I will have the chance to go into space if we want to do it. All you need to have is a lot of money. It’s coming.”

When Juan Ponce de León sailed into the mouth of the Miami River in 1513, he encountered a large Tequesta Indian village.

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés attempted to convert the Tequesta to Christianity, establishing a short lived mission at the village in 1567. Another failed mission was established there in 1743. The Spanish could not persuade the Tequesta to abandon their ancient belief system.

The native people of Florida were almost completely wiped out by unfamiliar diseases brought by the Europeans.

“With weakened tribes, the Spanish borders of Florida were fully breached by the English who instigated Creek raids as far south as Key West, enslaving thousands of Indians for the plantations of the Carolinas and Georgia,” says archaeologist Robert S. Carr. “By 1763, when the Spanish ceded Florida to England, the Tequesta and the Keys Indians had migrated to Cuba and become extinct as a culture. The last of the Tequesta moved to villages outside of Havana.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the banks at the mouth of the Miami River were found to be covered with remnants of the Tequesta culture, including extensive shell middens, black earth middens, and at least four burial mounds.

In the 1940s, archaeologist John M. Goggin gave the name “Glades culture” to the archeological remains found in Dade County. In the 1970s, the Granada site was excavated on one side of the mouth of the Miami River, uncovering evidence of year-round habitation by the Tequesta Indians and their ancestors.

Today, the only Tequesta site at the mouth of the Miami River that has not been destroyed by development is the Miami Circle located at Brickell Point, across from the Granada site.

In 1998, Robert S. Carr was conducting a routine salvage excavation of the Brickell Point site in advance of the construction of two high rise apartment buildings. Other apartment buildings from 1950 were torn down to make room for the new construction. Carr and his team uncovered Glades culture artifacts of shell, stone, bone, and pottery.

In January 1999, the announced discovery of the Miami Circle sparked imaginations around the world.

At the Brickell Point site, archaeologists uncovered a circle, about 28 feet across, defined by a series of postholes carved into the limestone bedrock. Carr said that the Miami Circle “may be of national significance as it is believed to be the only cut-in-rock prehistoric structural footprint ever found in eastern North America.”

Public speculation about what structure had been built on top of the Miami Circle was rampant, ranging from a Tequesta Indian Council House to an astronomical observatory constructed by transplanted Mayan people.

While there were undoubtedly prehistoric artifacts discovered at the Brickell Point site, not everyone is convinced that the Miami Circle was one of them.

“They don’t like me a lot in Miami,” says archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich, author of the book Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past.

When Milanich first saw the Miami Circle, he was surprised that a rectangular septic tank was inside of it.

“I think at that point, the research question should have been, how did that septic tank get there?” says Milanich. “Did it go with the apartments that were built in the 1940s? Did it go with one of the earlier Brickell houses that were there? Was there perhaps, a circular structure of some kind built over that septic tank?”

Milanich found an early twentieth century postcard of Brickell Point that shows a round structure that may be over the septic tank.

“I think what needs to be done still, to this day, is more research there, to try to answer the question of when that septic tank was put in, and what it was attached to,” says Milanich. “Clearly, that’s not a very popular idea, especially to people in Miami who worked so hard to get the government to buy the land and preserve the site.”

The Miami Circle is now protected as public land.

“All that’s left of this huge, complex archaeological site is that little bit that’s now preserved in the Miami Circle park area,” says Milanich. “I think that’s a good thing for the public, and certainly for our understanding of the past.”

Today, parking in downtown Cocoa can be at a premium when services or special events are held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.

When the church was first built in 1886, many in the congregation would arrive by water, mooring their boats on the banks of the Indian River. It’s just a few steps from the river’s edge to the front door of the church. Others would walk to church from homes along the river.

The first meeting of what would become St. Mark’s Episcopal Church was held on June 2, 1878. The Right Reverend John Freeman Young, Bishop of Florida, and Dr. William H. Carter of Holy Cross Church of Sanford, gathered the founding members of the church at the home of A.L. Hatch in Rockledge. Dr. Carter later moved to Tallahassee, but services continued to be held by various priests.

The church was originally called St. Michael’s, in recognition of St. Michael the Archangel.

In 1884, Mrs. Lucy Boardman, a frequent visitor to Cocoa and Melbourne from her winter residence in Sanford, donated funds to Bishop Young for the construction of Episcopal churches near the Indian River. Mrs. Sarah O. Delannoy donated the land where St. Mark’s sits today.

According to an historic marker erected by the Brevard County Historical Commission in 2010, Gabriel Gingras designed the board and batten Carpenter Gothic church. Early Cocoa residents William Booth and William Hindle designed and installed the church’s woodwork.

Dr. S.B. Carpenter, Rector of Holy Cross Church of Sanford, visited Cocoa once per month to oversee construction of the church. Although it was not quite finished, the first service was held in the new church on Christmas Eve, 1886.

The church’s tower bell, called “Michael,” was cast in New York in 1888.

In 1890, the name of the church was changed from St. Michael’s to St. Mark’s, in recognition of support provided by St. Mark’s Church in West Orange, New Jersey.

Although St. Mark’s has undergone significant additions and renovations over the years, most of the original interior woodwork and stained glass remains intact.

Many of the beautiful stained glass windows in St. Mark’s are dedicated to early founders of the church. For example, one panel is dedicated in memory of Arch Deacon William H. Gresson, who was born August 1846 and died June 1921.

Another window was created in memory of Emma J. Hardee, who was born October 6, 1847, and died May 16, 1915; and Florence H. Gingras, born May 16, 1870, and died November 6, 1913.

Sarepta E. Hartman, born May 9, 1839, and died December 9, 1924, is also remembered with a stained glass window. Another is dedicated to Cora M. Cook, born 1858, and died 1915.

When St. Mark’s was renovated in 1925, great care was taken to maintain the integrity of the original structure of the church. Stucco was added to the exterior, giving the building a Mediterranean style very popular at the time. Where additional woodwork was added to the interior, it closely matched the original.

With the addition of its first Rector, the Reverend William Loftin Hargrave, St. Mark’s was raised to “parish” status in 1938. Reverend Hargrave was later named Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of South Florida and Bishop of Southwest Florida.

In February 1942, the Emma Cecilia Thursby Memorial Fellowship Hall was completed, providing space for community gatherings. Thursby was a popular opera singer in America and Europe in the late 1800s and a professor of music at the Institute of Musical Art, now the Julliard School, in the early 1900s. Thursby and her sister wintered in Cocoa.

St. Mark’s Parish Day School, known today as St. Mark’s Episcopal Academy, was established in 1956. Since then, education has been a primary focus of the church.

The most recent renovations to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church were in 1994, when the worship area was expanded to its present capacity, and in 2012, when pews modeled after the originals were installed.

While fewer people walk to church or moor their sailboats nearby as they did in 1886, the full parking spaces around St. Mark’s each week indicate that the church is as vital a part of the Cocoa community as ever.

American war veterans and the conflicts they participated in are well represented in the archive at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa.

The Joseph Marshall Papers detail the activities of a Loyalist regiment in St. Augustine during the American Revolution of the 1770s and ‘80s.

The archive houses the East Florida Constitution, created as a result of the United States invasion of Spanish East Florida in 1812, during the Patriot War.

There are dozens of letters and journals from the Seminole Wars of the 1800s, including the journal of Jacob Mott, a U.S. Army Surgeon stationed in Florida.

Numerous Civil War documents from the 1860s include letters from Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and future Florida governor Francis P. Fleming.

The library’s collection of World War I memorabilia includes the Frank Rumfield Photograph Collection with images from Chapman Field in Miami.

Documentation of World War II features newspapers, original War Bonds posters, and the Irv Rubin Collection of wartime correspondence. Rubin and his family were the first Jewish business owners in Cocoa, with two sons and a daughter serving America during the war.

The archive safeguards stories of Korean War veteran, Medal of Honor recipient, and Cocoa resident Emory Bennett.

The archive is trying to expand one particular collection of veteran and war related materials.

“We have very little, actually, that deals with the Vietnam War period,” says Ben DiBiase, Director of Educational Resources for the Florida Historical Society and archivist at the Library of Florida History.

“We’re looking for any kind of documentation from someone who served in the armed forces during the Vietnam War era, or anyone who may have lived in Florida during that period, to help chronicle or help us to understand what that period was like in Florida history,” says DiBiase.

The effort to establish a Vietnam War Era Archive at the Library of Florida History was initiated by Florida Historical Society volunteer Bill Arbogast of Cocoa. Arbogast spent 24 years on active duty in the U.S. Army and served two tours of duty in Vietnam.

“We established the archive in 2013, which was the 50^th anniversary of the onset of what we now know as the Vietnam War era,” says Arbogast. “1963 is what’s officially recognized by the Veterans Administration as the start of that era.”

Arbogast saw a significant amount of material from World War II being donated to the archive by veterans of that conflict, and thought that the time had come for Vietnam War era veterans to be encouraged do the same.

“We’ve got a lot of Vietnam veterans who are reaching the age where they would want their memorabilia, their documentary evidence to be archived in such a way that it would be available to future researchers,” says Arbogast.

The Library of Florida History is not equipped to house artifacts such as flags, insignia, or other display items. What is needed are documentary materials such as records of military service, photographs, and letters that soldiers exchanged with their families.

While documenting the experiences of Vietnam veterans is essential to the archive, it is hoped that a complete picture of the time period will be created.

“We’re looking for anyone who was impacted by the Vietnam War in one way or another,” says Arbogast. “We’re also interested in those people who looked at the war as a negative experience and participated in demonstrations against the war. Those things are important, I think, to recognize the controversy that war created among the people of this nation.”

Arbogast and DiBiase have created a simple process for veterans and others to submit material to the Vietnam War Era archive. A basic submission form is online at myfloridahistory.org/vietnamarchive.

“Even copies of original documents would be acceptable for this particular collection,” says DiBiase. “It’s really the information that we’re hoping to capture.”

Arbogast is hopeful that people will respond to the call for submissions to the archive.

“It will let us put the war in the emotional context that it created in this country. The opposition to it, the fervor of patriotism that was associated with it, the tumultuous experience that individuals had, separated from their families, separated from their loved ones.”