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Photo Diary: Old Fort Park, New Smyrna Beach FL [1]

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Date: 2023-03-01

The Old Fort is one of the oldest structures in New Smyrna, but nobody is really sure when it was built, or what it even is.

For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida.

In 1763, the British defeated the French in the French and Indian War, and as part of the peace treaty, Spain, who had allied herself with France, was forced to turn over the territory of Florida to English control. Three years later a Scottish doctor named Andrew Turnbull and his business partner Sir William Duncan received a Royal Grant for a large tract of land in Florida, located just south of the former Spanish colony at St Augustine.

While Duncan remained in the UK, Turnbull named his settlement “Smyrnea”, recruited over 1400 people from Greece, Italy and Minorca to go there, and traveled along as the local governor. Some 150 of them died during the trans-Atlantic voyage, but the rest settled in and began producing cotton, indigo, hemp and sugar cane for export to England. The settlement remained in place even after the Spanish regained control of Florida after the American Revolutionary War in 1783, finally becoming an American city after the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1821. Today we know the town as New Smyrna Beach.

But sitting alongside the waterfront in New Smyrna is a mystery. It is a low 40x80 foot rectangle made from coquina—the locally-quarried rock made from small seashells cemented together by sandtone. This is the same material from which the forts in St Augustine were made, and those were also rectangular in shape, and this has led some to conclude that the New Smyrna ruins are the unfinished walls of a Spanish fort. But there is no contemporary document or map indicating that there was ever any Spanish outpost here.

Some people also attribute another coquina structure about three miles away as being an outer defensive blockhouse from the presumed Spanish Fort, but records are clear that this outlying structure is actually a sugar mill that was built during the British period and was destroyed in 1835 by a Native American raid during the Second Seminole War.

There is a letter written by Turnbull which was sent to Duncan in England, stating that construction had begun on a manor house located on Duncan's 20,000 acre tract of land (which was being managed by Turnbull), so it has also been speculated that the “Old Fort” is actually the unfinished walls of that manor house.

However, other documents raise a different possibility. The Smyrnea colony struggled for years before most of its residents finally gave up in 1777, with many of them moving to St Augustine or Charleston SC. In 1801, ownership of a portion of Turnbull's land passed to a doctor from Connecticut named Ambrose Hull, and he is recorded as having constructed a large stone house in the area. That house was then destroyed in a raid during the War of 1812. And that may account for the current ruins.

Others have speculated that the “Fort” may have been a church, or perhaps part of a shipyard located near a wharf.

What is known for sure it that the current Old Fort structure was the site of the Sheldon Hotel, a 40-room tavern built on the stone foundation in 1853. This wooden structure was blown apart in July 1863, during the Civil War, when a Union gunship shelled the town and hit a stockpile of gunpowder that was being stored in the hotel's basement. John Sheldon rebuilt his hotel after the war, but it was then torn down in 1896, leaving only the low stone walls.

Today, the site is preserved as the Old Fort Park, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Despite a number of archaeological digs at the site, it has still not been accurately dated, and the mystery of its origin remains.

Some photos from a visit.

The fort is located inside a city park

The structure looks out over the harbor/marina

There is an outer wall banked with dirt

Some parts of the wall are bare

The brick sections and stairs were added later

The structure is coquina and mortar

The entire structure is divided into sections

But there don’t seem to be any doors or stairs inside

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/1/2150912/-Photo-Diary-Old-Fort-Park-New-Smyrna-Beach-FL

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