LIVING HISTORY
in 1807, giving his name to Hutchinson Island. But James
Hutchinson died before he could get his island properly
surveyed. So, grandson John only staked out a claim for one
of the 160-acre government-giveaway parcels.
Some of the colonists were invalids suffering from tuberculosis,
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including 27-year-old Caleb Brayton (permit
holder #236). Brayton had moved from Fall River, Mass., to
Augusta in hopes of finding healthier weather. Doctors told
him the fresh salt air on Florida’s East Coast was more likely
to extend his young life. Sadly for Brayton but fortunately
for history, his wife, Marian, refused to come along. So, the
lonely young man’s letters to home provide us with our best
glimpses of daily life in the ill-fated colony.
A FUTURE GOVERNOR
There were also romantic adventurers like Ossian Hart
(permit holder #62), whose hopes for the colony’s future
swirled around what Hart called “the prospect of bringing
forth and presenting to the world a new region of Tropical
Country.” Hart was a scion of one of Florida’s first families.
He had grown up on a 2,000-acre plantation in western Duval
County called “Paradise.” His father, Isaiah D. Hart, cofounded
the city of Jacksonville.
In the Florida Territory, few young men had enjoyed more
privilege or received a better education than Ossian Hart. He
was trained at the top prepratory school in the Old South:
the Willington Academy in South Carolina, where John C.
Calhoun had gone. So, the young lawyer might have been
expected to cleave to the fineries of Southern culture, but an
independent spirit persuaded him to help conquer a rugged
region. Hart imagined a future when continual streams
of ships would leave his tropical plantation “laden with the
sweet orange and the well-flavored lemon as fine as ever
grew in Sicily …”
THE BOARDING HOUSE
Frederick Weedon (permit holder #1) got the jump on everybody
else. As a former Army surgeon in the recent Florida War,
he had the inside track on snagging the abandoned fortress
called Fort Pierce. That’s where he set up his new homestead.
Dr. Weedon shrewdly calculated that the existing buildings
could serve as a boarding house for other settlers moving into
the area. They would need lodging and storage facilities while
they cleared their palmetto-shrouded properties.
Weedon’s business acumen was the subject of widespread
notoriety. He was the last physician to have tended Osceola
on his deathbed. Somehow the good doctor ended up with
the famous Seminole leader’s severed head, which he put on
display at a drugstore in St. Augustine and charged admission
to see. As far as anyone can tell, he did not bring Osceola’s
head with him when he moved down to Fort Pierce.
FLORIDA MEMORY
When Florida was a U.S. Territory, this area was part of Mosquito County.
MUSEUM OF FLORIDA HISTORY
Ossian B. Hart was probably the most prominent colonist in the Indian
River settlement. The son of the founder of Jacksonville, he became the
area’s first territorial representative in Tallahassee and later became governor
of Florida.
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