It all started about 500 A.D. when the Native American People lived off the land and called there Ais village Caparaca. Many of these Indians would often create mounds composed of oyster shells, animal bones, shellfish and some pottery. Over the years these would be turned into mounds as dirt was placed over each layer. That mound would keep building and of course all the way to 1500 A.D. is when this mound was complete. The larger part of this mound was removed for road filling many years ago. However today a part of this mound still stands as Turnbull's palace ruins are built right into the mound. Some say these coquina ruins date back before 1866 before Turnbull's arrival and some say that Andrew Turnbull had them built for a palace he was constructing.  Coquina is millions of tiny shells fused together to make a rock which was common building material during this time period. Many rumors state that the ruins were some pre-colonial fort or Spanish Church nobody really knows. Even some said they resemble a Spanish Forts from the 1500s. Some believe that Turnbull found this foundation and started to build on top of it. So alot of mystery surrounds them.

Dr. Andrew Turnbull was a Scot and had recruited over 1190  Minorcans, 110 Italians, and 200 Greeks to homestead the 101,000 acres he received from a land grant by the British at that time Florida was under there rule. He named the city or rather colony New Smyrna Turkey after the place where his wife was born. Sadly 148 of these travelers died at sea before they could reach the colony. However over a decade the colony began to fail as Shortages, mosquito's, disease, hunger and Turnbull's Politics caused the colony to turn northward which eventually would lead to settlements in the St. Augustine's area. Though this settlement led to this area being the second oldest city in the state of Florida and right near the ruins was where the settlement was centralized at. Turnbull's plantation was considered a class B one and although his sugar mill failed eventually his lands stretched all the way to Ponce Inlet and even parts of the Canaveral Sea Shore. 

If you wish to get a little more in depth over Turnbull's life he traveled to various areas to recruit these colonist with almost 1700 settlers in his colony New Smyrna became one of the largest British Colonies in the New World. By 1777 the Minorcans rebelled and a huge uprising took place. The reason for this is the overseers were becoming to powerful and abusing the colonist this mistreatment caused 1700 to be reduced to only 600 remaining. As they rebelled they petitioned the English Governor in St Augustine to let them stay there and be free. Court was held on the overseers cruelty and ill treatments. The colonist won and Gov. Patrick Tonyn ordered total freedom with permission to settle in St. Augustine. Francisco Pellicer who was the head carpenter at the plantation led the colonist over down King's Road also said to be haunted all the way to St Augustine's. The last to leave was Father Pedro Camps the priest of the colony. When all the colonist left Turnbull, His Family, Overseers and Black Slaves remained in New Smyrna. This left a weakness and in Dec. of 1777 they were raided by 40 plus Indians. By 1781 Turnbull and his family left for South Carolina to practice medicine turning New Smyrna into a ghost town and leaving these 40' x 80' stone palace unfinished.

After Turnbull left the area The Spanish regained control of Florida by swapping the Bahamas for Florida in 1783. So the Spanish once again settled in the area where the fort stood. By 1804 a man by the name of Ambrose Hull an Episcopal Minister from CT obtained more then 2,600 acres of land in New Smyrna in 1801 from the Spanish.  In 1805 he built his home on the foundation of the old fort ruins. He used this land to plant sugar and cotton.  By 1812 his home was destroyed in the War Of 1812 by patriot radicals. This to me was a surprise because 90 percent of this war was fought around Buffalo NY and the Niagara Region where we were once based. So yes the war in some forms did extend as far south as Florida. Hull fled to St. Augustine's after this.

By 1835 16 years after the Spanish resold the state of Florida to the New United States a man by the name Thomas Stamps from South Carolina a sugar planter started a 100 acre sugar plantation. He owned the ruins of the old fort and surrounding land. The Seminole Indians at that time were setting fires to all the sugar mills in the area. The plantation was burnt to the ground and all the beautiful sites around the Turnbull ruins were leveled and lost to these tragedies.

Later on an elegant hotel was built on the original foundation in 1859 by John Sheldon and his wife which had two stories and 40 plus rooms. It was called I believe the Sheldon House. However in 1863 Union Sailors shelled it from the waterway which is only a 100 feet away sending the hotel into oblivion. The oldest living oak near the hotel absorbed a cannon ball and today they still say its embedded inside of the tree. The Union soldiers perhaps mistook the hotel for a Confederate fort of some kind and of course since St. Augustine's has a fort along the water it would be no wonder that these fort ruins could also be mistaken as one. The gunboats Oleander and Bourgard were responsible for this. The Yankees dispatched these gunboats to curtail blockade running and capture other vessels carrying contraband along the waterways. The skirmish did kill 6 crewman and 2 officers dead with many others taken prisoner. Although the confederates suffered no death there was two that were wounded in this small battle. After this tragedy and the Civil War in 1867 Sheldon rebuilt the hotel which was used as a shopping center until about 1896. It was rebuilt from driftwood from the ocean. When it was complete it had a post office, port collector's office, general store of Dolph Sheldon And M.I. Childs, and A newspaper shoe shop. The reason for it no longer standing is that it was torn down.

As the next century passed the site would no longer be used rather just admired by those passing through downtown New Smyrna. Today the fort has become part of a park with many benches, live oak trees, one of New Smyrna's first municipal buildings and of course various monuments which state the history of the entire area. Today some of the coquina wells still stand as well is the fort which sits on the Timucuan mound.  

The park has many uses as art exhibits take place, reenactments of the civil war, parades and even archaeologist trying to excavate the grounds. Students were paid and even invited to help with this and so many artifacts were found. Lets talk about some of the things found for example a three layer tabby floor constructed with oyster shells and bonded with homemade mortar. Some believe this flooring served for some kind of warehouse. Or how about the silver pin which was found some believe it was a piece of hardware to fasten shutters which was common during Turnbull's time. Then there was a iron shoe buckle, a pearl button and some Mochaware pottery found on the site which were common in the 1700s. Alot of Pearlware was found which was a ceramic used around the 1790s. Lastly a military issued spoon, brass military buttons and shelling have been found on the site to indicate it was a military outpost during the Seminole War of 1835. 

Very few people however who pass by this site area ware of all this history and probably most of them are not even aware of how much energy surrounds this site. The entire area fort, grounds, park, trees all seem extremely haunted. More residual perhaps? But if you look at the entire history we are looking at 1500 years of events everything from native Americans thriving off the land to the Spanish Explorers in the 1500s visiting New Smyrna. Then we have various plantations which had risen as fast as they had fallen in the area to wars fought like the War of 1812 or the Civil War or even the Indians raiding the area burning significant places down. The rise and fall of these ruins remains a total mystery as so many times it was inhabited by many different colonist such as Turnbull, Hull, Stamps and Sheldon. But all ended in the same result a failure and only today what remains is the old fort and day dreams of what use to be. 


© By

Rick-AngelOfThyNight

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