By Elizabeth Smith. Originally published in the January 1969 issue of the Magnolia Monthly.
Fort Stansbury (or Stansberry) can be found on maps of Leon County made in the 1840’s but its life was short, and few but dedicated archeologists have found its location. After Wakulla County was formed out of the southern half of Leon County in 1843, the fort’s location was put on Wakulla County maps, but by then it was already going out of existence.
The fort, which was apparently started in 1840, was a hastily erected log enclosure and used to help subdue the southern Creek, or Seminole, Indians during the Second Seminole War.
During Indian raids on settlers’ cabins, tribes were urged (and forced) to migrate to reservations in Arkansas, and the tale of the Seminole exodus is as sad as that of the later Cherokees and the ‘’Trail of Tears” which led to the settling of Oklahoma Territory. In the Seminole migration, Fort Stansbury played its part.
The fort is mentioned briefly in a description by a clergyman (name unknown), who was visiting in Tallahassee in 1841. In an article published by Horace Greeley in his THE NEW YORKER newspaper for August 21 of that year, the minister tells of boarding the cars of the St Marks Railroad and traveling ten miles southward before getting off and being met by soldiers on horseback who take him to the fort According to his description, the fort had originally been a settler’s home, and the owner had left because of the Indians. “This we found to be a more desirable residence than we could have expected. It was a large log house, and under the hands of the officers it had acquired an appearance of refinement. Of course I am speaking comparatively. I do not wish to have it understood that in winter or in rainy weather one would find much protection under a roof so open to the sky, or from logs which lie so invitingly agape for the wind to enter.” Nevertheless, the visitor enjoyed the cool breeze coming thru the cracks and did not have to suffer the inconveniences of bad weather.
The clergyman mentions also that he had arrived on pay day when each soldier stepped up to a table to receive his wages for the month, apparently with little concern. He is then taken by an escort of soldiers to the Wakulla River where a boat is prepared for him to travel up the river to its source at Wakulla Springs.
For reasons unclear, the fort is also closely associated with Port Leon, the town founded on the St. Marks River shortly before it enters Apalachee Bay, halfway between St. Marks and the lighthouse. Port Leon was a town laid out by Territorial Gov. Richard K. Call beginning in 1840 and it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1843. The town’s duration was that of the fort, and the location of Stansbury is about halfway between Port Leon and Tallahassee. An author named Alonzo deMilt wrote in his book, “The American Wanderer”, that his family arrived from New York to live at Port Leon in 1840 and when most of the family was wiped out by yellow fever that same year, he went to see an officer at the fort who had known his family in the North. Troops leaving from Fort Stansbury often shipped out from Port Leon. There may have been some of Territorial Gov. Richard K. Call’s handiwork in this matter, for to encourage people to use the extension of the Tallahassee Railroad from St. Marks to Port Leon, he refused to allow passengers (but not freight) to get on or off the train at St. Marks after a railroad bridge had been built from the St. Marks across the river to Port Leon in 1839, three years after the tram line had been constructed from Tallahassee to St. Marks. Call had also scouted along the St. Marks River for signs of unrest among the Seminoles in the latter 1830’s, with his aide, Prince Archille Murat, and may have debated the wisdom of putting the fort where was located.
Probably the most interesting and well-known officer to serve at Fort Stansbury was Ethan Allen Hitchcock (see cover) a New Yorker who spent half a century in the service of his country and writing about it in a book, FIFTY YEARS IN CAMP AND FIELD. His tale begins with the War of 1812, involves many frontier skirmishes with the Indians, and concludes with his position as a Union general in charge of prisoner-of-war exchanges during the Civil War. He was by that time a white-haired, elderly man.
Col. Hitchcock was a scholar and a diarist who was called to serve at Fort Stansbury in the summer of 1842. It took him 30 days to travel from New York City to Tallahassee, going by way of Pittsburg, Lexington, Nashville, and Macon, and using every conveyance of the time, including railroad, canal boat, steamboat, stage, and for the last 100 miles, horse and wagon. On the long journey he read the works of Shakespeare and Plotinus, and wrote over 200 pages in his diary.
The Yankee officer reached Fort Stansbury in October, 1842, and found the log structure in the middle of a field. He soon converted the former settler’s house into a cantonment in the form of a parallelogram, with a large area for parades and exercises. With him was the U. S. Third Army (later Cavalry) Regiment, mostly northerners, who were given such a thorough course of instruction and so perfected their drills that the unit commanded attention for years and distinguished itself in the Mexican War.
Two local companies of volunteers also offered their services, but Hitchcock said he would send for them when needed.
In his diary Hitchcock noted, “There is something indescribably solemn and grand in the moaning of the wind through the tall pines among which my post is situated.” He has little time to say much else, for he is called upon to persuade a Seminole chief, Pascofa, to go with his immediate tribe to Arkansas.
Pascofa had been raiding homesteads along the Apalachicola River and a particularly brutal murder involving the Perkins family in Washington County caused settlers to leave there in the summer of 1842. Gov Call appealed to Pres. Tyler for help, and this was the reason Col. Hitchcock and the Third Regiment were sent to Fort Stansbury.
However, Hitchcock’s negotiations with Pascofa were delicate. The Indians, perhaps for good reason, thought that migration meant sending them to their deaths, and they resisted every effort made to repatriate them. In order to keep from giving away their hide-outs in the swamps, they sometimes killed their children to keep them from crying out and giving away their presence. Gov. Call’s militia could not even locate an Indian after the Perkins massacre, but Hitchcock made contact with Pascofa and said he would meet with him at some point safe from meddling by settlers or Florida troops.
In January, 1843, the two men agreed on a location between Fort Stansbury and Ocheesee north of Apalachicola. This was the bank of the Ochlockonee River, and Hitchcock arrived there by steamboat to confer with the tribal leader. When Hitchcock pointed out with obvious sincerity that Pascofa’s tribe would be taken by boat nearly the whole way to Arkansas and given new land beyond the settlers’ reach, and no one would be mistreated, Pascofa was finally won over. His band of Seminoles were taken to Cedar Keys on the steamboat “William Gaston” and from there went to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to Arkansas.
Col. Hitchcock returned to Fort Stansbury were he wrote that he had “four companies in log huts and six in tents”, more than 600 at full strength. Gov. Call gave him a party in Tallahassee, along with his officers, in February with several hundred people in attendance. In March Hitchcock and the Third Infantry, their job in Florida completed, were transferred to the Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, and then were shipped the same route as that taken by Pascofa and his tribe the month before.
John Sprague, one of the best chroniclers of the Seminole Wars, spent some time at Fort Stansbury, but does not remember it with much fondness. Met were wet to the skin from hacking their way thru the swamps, after which the burning sun dried them out before they became wet again, with the result that many soldiers suffered from fever and dysentery. Sprague mentions that the first casualty at Fort Stansbury occurred among the enlisted men.
Most of the archaeological work at Fort Stansbury has been done by Stanley Olson of Tallahassee under the auspices of the archaeology department at Florida State University. Working through the early 1960’s and describing his finds in the fourth quarterly issue of “American Antiquity” for 1965, Dr. Olsen stated that he found no fort burial ground, but turned up uniform buttons made of cast pewter, from outfits obviously outdated that had been issued to the men. An eight-foot fireline plowed through the area also uncovered broken pieces of black glass and clay pipestems. A jacket button of the Artillery Corps indicates the fort may have been equipped with some heavy guns. Navy personnel coming into Port Leon or St. Marks may have stopped at the fort, for a brass button of a U. S. naval officer was also located.
But for all its relevance to the Seminole Wars, there is little left to tell of Stansbury as the second most important fort in Wakulla County.
ain.
The Wakulla County Historical Society Museum is in the Old Jail at 24 High Drive in Crawfordville. We are open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.
