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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Land before time
By Owen Fogleman | News-Journal Correspondent
DELAND — The earliest known residents of Volusia County did not choose to live on the beachside, but on a small island at the northwest corner of Lake Woodruff, some 15 miles from DeLand.
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Midden |
Today, only wildlife roams the 273 acres of woodlands and open savannas of Tick Island, a beautiful, picturesque and mysterious place between the lake and the St. Johns River.
But once it was a huge, teeming village of Timucuan Indians, dating perhaps as far back as 2000 B.C., according to Ripley P. Bullen, an archaelogist who unearthed and moved skeletons and artifacts to the Florida Museum of Natural History. Some 150 ancient skeletons were found in a single trench on the island in 1961.
Tick Island once was under private ownership but today is administered by the Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. Harold Morrow, refuge manager for the Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge, said, "One reason this refuge was established is the fact it has a great deal of historical and archaeological significance. We're here to preserve and to protect for coming generations the fish, wildlife and plant resources found here." He and his staff have law enforcement authority.
Yet, during the time of the 1961 excavation, local interest in the archaeological finds was so great that Ponce DeLeon Springs began a daily passenger tour of the area in four tour boats. Each passenger was promised a piece of pottery from the island of 500 to 1500 B.C. origin, according to an article in The Daytona Beach News-Journal in 1961.
Another feature attracting attention to Tick Island was the great "midden," or shell pile long known to be there.
DeLand historian Bill Dreggors explained that snails and mussels, which live in shells, were a staple in the Indian diet. Women and children gathered and boiled them to a rich broth which their people apparently liked. The shells then were thrown onto an ever-growing mound. Dimensions of the Tick Island mound are unknown, Dreggors said. However, one at Volusia, on the St. Johns, covered 2.8 acres and measured 50 feet in height. The one on Tick Island, he said, was smaller than that. These middens had been growing since before the time of Christ, he said.
Thrown out with the shells were artifacts. A man named W.W. Branton negotiated a lease for the shell, brought in earth-moving machines, equipment to clean the shell and a barge that hauled away 70 tons of it in one load and continued the operation for more than eight years.
Branton never got all the shell but he collected quantities of artifacts from the shell midden. In a published article he said there were large numbers of arrowheads, pottery in unbe lievable shapes and sizes, small pointed objects he identified as women's hairpins, digging equipment and other objects made from shell and bone. Many of the objects found there were highly polished and intricately carved, obviously meant for decorative purposes, he said. Many of these finds, he estimated, may be thousands of years old.
The shell itself was sold as a base material for driveways and parking areas and was particularly useful in septic drain fields.
It was in one of Branton's shell pits that archaeologist Bullen discovered the skeletons he unearthed about four feet beneath the surface of the shell mound. The excavation party worked mostly with small hand trowels and soft brushes to remove the dirt and sand from the delicate skeletons as they were dug out.
From their excavation trench, they removed 150 intact skeletons, all of whom were bound so their knees touched their shoulders and buried on their right sides. It was obvious that not all died natural deaths. Some were either murdered or killed in combat, according to the printed opinion. Arrowheads were found in the skeletons. One person, Bullen is quoted as saying, suffered from a very bad toothache. "We found a skull with a badly diseased tooth."
There was some evidence of disease, but nothing of the epidemic type.
Published reports from the dig included such opinions from the archeologists that these Indians preserved their dead by smoking them, just as hams are cured. The bodies, they said, probably were stored for years in "charnal houses," until at a ceremonial event they would bury the many dead at one time in huge, open grave pits.
Isolated and deserted though it is, there still is another claim to fame attached to the fabled Tick Island. Before the grant freezes of 1894 and 1895, it was the site of large orange groves.
They were some of the best-tasting oranges grown anywhere, said John Turner of DeLand, retired Volusia County tax accessor, a lifetime resident of Volusia County and enthusiastic historian of Volusia County people and affairs.
It was Turner who supplied most of the historical data for this article.
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