Johns County also is looking to develop the area around the Fort Peyton marker.
Moore said the marker may be replaced soon as part of an agreement with a potential subdivision developer, and he said St. That marker is nearly hidden by palmetto fronds.īut that site may get new life, too, Moore said.
According to local tradition, it is located about a mile south of the Fort Peyton site where a trail leads through nearly a third of a mile of underbrush and to another faceless coquina marker. The actual spot of the Seminole war leader's capture is even more overgrown. Spilling, who lives near the markers, said he organized the restoration because when he was growing up, "I wished it was more built up and people had a place to go back there and eat lunch, sit and talk instead of it being all overgrown with weeds." That marker, a coquina monument erected in 1916, also commemorated Osceola's capture at a nearby site but has long since lost the plate describing that capture. In addition to restoring a marker that describes the history of Fort Peyton and mentions Osceola's capture, volunteers from Spilling's troop also mulched the area, added wooden benches and created a planter around another marker. "There was a bunch of bullet holes around the sign and the post was all shot up," explained Kevin Spilling, 17, a Pedro Menendez High School senior and Eagle Scout who organized a project to restore the marker and dress up the site. It burned down in 1840.īut until this year, not even the marker could bear witness to the life and eventual betrayal of one of the most well-known Indian leaders of the era. Augustine during the Second Seminole Indian War. He was taken prisoner under a flag of truce and was imprisoned in the Castillo de San Marcos, where he died shortly afterward.Ĭtxt_ad_source = 'npc_morris_staugustinerecord_t2_ctxt' įort Peyton, not far from the Wildwood Creek neighborhood, was one of several forts designed to protect St. 26, 1837, federal troops from Fort Peyton captured one of the government's fiercest enemies in Florida, Seminole war leader Osceola.įor years, Osceola had bedeviled the government's attempts to remove Native Americans from the area. A quiet street in the peaceful Wildwood Creek neighborhood leads to a site that marks government betrayal, bloodshed and a fire that consumed a national landmark nearly 170 years ago.
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