In episode three of “Forgotten Park,” Larry Luckey's vision for a community park to host the Cane Grinding Festival was beginning to take shape.
Luckey knew the general history of the plot of land that he chose for his park, including its past as a site inhabited by indigenous people … and its current use as Ortona's dump.
What he did not anticipate were the historical treasures awaiting discovery. Those were revealed during a site survey he needed in order to build his park.
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I asked him if his neighbors knew about the native mounds.
“Nobody in Ortona knew much about that, except me and few, maybe three or four,” said Luckey.
He said that even though the land was owned by Glades County, the information wasn't exactly public knowledge.
"Nobody else really understood it and knew the significance," said Luckey. "That's when I called Bob Carr.”
When Luckey applied for a state grant in 1987 to build a community park on the site of Ortona's dump, he met Director of Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, Bob Carr.
Carr was the one to give Luckey the news that he needed a site survey.
“I was contacted directly by the Property Appraiser for Glades County, his name was Larry Luckey," said Carr. "He finds out that he has to do an archeological assessment as part of getting the money. And he's very surprised by that, although he's very interested in the history.”
Luckey's family has lived in Ortona for roughly 100 years. I asked him what he already knew about the property before the site survey.
“The park was where the old original Ortona dump," said Luckey. "Well, I wanted to move all that out.”
He said he knew about the mounds since he was a child.
"I think I even had a picture of my sister on one of the mounds," said Luckey.
When asked why the mounds were not protected, Larry did not have an answer.
“It's sad," said Luckey. "It saddens me. You know, I can't answer that. But …. there's no use and inquiring.”
The site survey at Ortona occurred in 1988. Bob Carr and his team of archeologists discovered that the property contained a vast array of mounds and an intricate network of canals created by indigenous people.
“We were fortunate to be able to do excavations on the bed of one of the canals, we came up with a radiocarbon date also around 300-400 A.D.,” said Carr.
The canals were hand-dug using wooden and shell tools. The waterways were 20 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet deep, stretching over seven miles.
Carr said that the site’s original surveyor in the late 19th Century attributed the creation of the mounds and canals to another group entirely.
“He believes, like most Americans would have believed at that time, that it's impossible to think of Native Americans doing canals and earthworks300-400 A.D.,” said Carr. "This must be the result of Europeans and whites, and he believes that it's from the Seminole Wars that the military might have made these canals.”
However, Carr and his team's discoveries show that the area's indigenous population possessed these advanced capabilities 400 years prior to the start of the Seminole War in 1835, effectively refuting all previous assumptions.
“The Ortona canal, or I should say canals, is one of the most ambitious and energetic and effective canal systems in North America that had been done by prehistoric people,” said Carr.
Carr explained that between A.D. 200 and A.D. 400, South Florida experienced a "Golden Age of Development.”
“Ortona is a significant archaeological site,” said Carr. "It is a major point of communication, trade and habitation for Native people that are likely the Calusa.”
The Ortona site yielded common trade items, like copper and basalt, similar to artifacts uncovered at indigenous Hopewellian sites in the Ohio River Valley.
“You get this idea of this very expansive trade area of a very strongly defined social stratigraphy and management of a very large site, complex that may have disappeared, or been greatly lessened by the time Europeans arrived,” said Carr.
The largest remaining mound can still be found today. It’s outside the park boundaries in between the current Ortona dump and the historic cemetery, standing nearly 26 feet high and 328 feet wide.
Carr said that the mound used to be bigger, but it was quarried for road construction 70 years ago. Mounds, he said, were a solution to living in an area prone to flooding by the Caloosahatchee River.
“The idea of the mound is to create a platform that's elevated sufficiently that you could do something on top of it,” said Carr.
That "something" could have included housing, community structures, and burial rituals.
“Unfortunately, the earthworks at Ortona have been leveled,” said Carr. "We have historic aerial photographs going back to the 1940s. And in those aerial photos, the earthwork locations and patterns are very clear and discernible. And it's because of that, that we have a better idea of where they were before that before it was leveled.”
Carr and his team also discovered a 450-foot pond in the shape of a baton near the site of the park, which Carr notes is a traditional religious symbol.
"It's on private land around it. But again, we found it by aerial photos, and it was still there at the time that we did our assessment," said Carr.
"We got radiocarbon dates from that, I believe it was like 400 to 700 A.D. So, it was very unique effort to create this pond with this particular shape."
He believes that the placement of the Ortona mounds fit a pattern for other historic sites.
“They were reoccurring across Southwest Florida in various geometric forms and shapes, which probably were largely functional,” said Carr. "They concluded circles, semi circles, causeways, alignments that connected mounds in some cases.”
When the Ortona archaeological survey began, Carr showed Larry Luckey the mounds and earthworks that remained throughout the proposed park.
“He looks at and he goes, ‘Well, Bob these are just little, itty bitty mounds,’ he said, ‘These aren't even that big.’ I said, 'Yeah, but they're still important. So you can't just put your park over it, you'd have to integrate all this into your park, because there's a very large mound, that everybody's aware of, that unfortunately, most of it has been dug away.'”
Larry R. Luckey’s Ortona Indian Mound Park officially opened in 1989. An informative pavilion and a boardwalk were constructed to educate the public about the history of the Ortona’s indigenous people.
Today, it is neglected and covered in debris; the connecting boardwalk is in ruins.
“The Ortona site complex is certainly one of the most significant sites in Florida,” said Carr. "And it's worthy of preservation and continuing for what's left to the site, and for creating the narrative of that site by interpreting it in a proper way.”
In the fourth episode of ‘Forgotten Park,’ the annual Cane Grinding Festival continues to bring visitors to Ortona Indian Mound Park. Yet no concrete plans to preserve the land’s indigenous legacy are officially in place.
So, what does the future hold?
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