Pioneer Florida families have been upholding the tradition of cane harvesting in Glades County with the annual Sugar Cane Grinding Festival at Ortona Indian Mound Park, held the first Saturday in February.
The park is situated west of Lake Okeechobee on State Road 75.
Its landscape is a blend of towering moss-covered oak hammocks, palmetto trees, and pine forest habitats, including a serene man-made lake.
🔊 Listen to Forgotten Park Episodes 2-5
The 60-acre county-owned land teems with wildlife, from the lively scrub jays and gopher tortoises to the silent presence of alligators.
For visitors, there's a playground, well-maintained pavilions, and bathrooms.
The true significance of the park unfolds when you stumble upon a spider web-covered pavilion and a dilapidated wooden bridge to the right of the main entrance.
It's here that the secrets of Ortona are somewhat revealed.
Archaeologists trace the site back to 300 A.D., providing evidence of an ancient indigenous tribe, possibly related to the Calusa. The area was once a vital point of communication, trade, and habitation, enabling travel between Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Ortona Indian Mound Park is home to an extensive network of hand-dug canoe canals, some of the oldest and longest ever constructed by indigenous people in North America.
Stretching seven miles and measuring 20 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet deep, these canals exemplify the native people’s engineering skills. A fact that has changed our understanding of Native American ingenuity during that era.
When exploring the park, I met the Williams family. They shared invaluable insights about the park's legacy.
“It's kind of like the forgotten park,” said Dorinda Williams-Campos.
Dorinda Williams-Campos has lived in Glades County for six generations. Her family was instrumental in organizing the annual Cane Grinding Festival now held at Ortona Indian Mound Park.
The festival celebrates how Florida settlers cultivated and processed sugarcane in the late 1800s.
Williams-Campos wishes that Glades County would take more action to preserve what remains of the Ortona people’s legacy, which would in turn help draw more visitors to the cane grinding festival.
“We need signage, we need something, saying the history of the Calusa Indians and why it's called the Indian Mound Park. And give some details to that and tell the different areas.”
Throughout the park, what appear to be large sand dunes are actually mounds created by native peoples.
A 20-foot-tall mound can be found outside the park’s borders, in between Ortona’s historic cemetery and the current city dump. This mound remains the highest point in Glades County, though you wouldn’t be able to identify it.
To Williams-Campos' point, there are no plaques, signs, or any indicators explaining what the towering sand mounds represent, leaving these sites vulnerable to further destruction or fading into obscurity.
“I don't know why, but we don't have a lot of support to fix it up. But we're working on that,” said Williams-Campos.
In episode two: The yearly Sugar Cane Grinding Festival, held at Larry R. Luckey’s Ortona Indian Mound Park, celebrates traditional Florida customs.
We explore the festival’s origins and how it inadvertently protects a deeper history concerning native life that carries profound significance nationwide.
'Forgotten Park' is edited by WGCU's Pam James.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.
