LIVING HISTORY
oldest among the settlers. He brought hundreds
of books down from his home in Charleston and
stuffed them into a palm-thatched cottage. At the
convention the colonists formed a militia called
the St. Lucie Riflemen. At least 50 men signed up
to defend the colony.
Although most historians call the intrepid
venture the Indian River Settlement, St. Lucie
seems to have been the preferred name the colonists
14
attached to their endeavor. In March 1844,
a territorial council carved out a big chunk of
Mosquito County and named it St. Lucie County.
The boundaries included the present-day Treasure
Coast. Samuel Peck, whose boat problems
FLORIDA MEMORY
Mills Burnham Jr. spent
his early childhood in the
colony. At 19, he joined the
Confederate army and soon
died in Chattanooga.
had yet to take him down, was chosen as county
judge. Caleb Brayton became the county clerk.
The following November, Ossian Hart was elected as St. Lucie County’s
first representative in Tallahassee. Reluctantly, he left his 21-year-old wife
behind for several months while he attended the territorial legislature’s
final session. Hart fought to solidify St. Lucie’s standing as a county, and
he voted against statehood for Florida. That’s because he didn’t want to
lose all the extra federal dollars a U.S. territory could claim. But with Iowa
in line to become a new Free State, Hart’s opponents were anxious for underpopulated
Florida to join the Union as a Slave State. In the increasingly
hostile halls of Congress, Southerners struggled to maintain a tenuous
balance of power in the U.S. Senate.
INDIAN NEIGHBORS
As Florida entered the Union in 1845, the hopeful colony on St. Lucie
Sound was a full-blown county — on paper. There wasn’t a courthouse or
a jail. They had no roads, no theater, no church, no wharf, no regular mail
FLORIDA MEMORY
Mills O. Burnham, a gunsmith, moved to Florida from New
York for health reasons. After the colony on St. Lucie Sound
disappeared, he became Cape Canaveral’s lighthouse keeper.
RICK CRARY
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The Armed Occupation settlement along the Indian River (then known as St. Lucie Sound) stretched throughout the Treasure Coast from below present-day
Stuart to north of the Sebastian area.