AIS
Some historians estimate that the Ais
numbered about 20,000 at the time of
their first interactions with Europeans,
with about 2,000 people living in Jece.
The Ais are thought to be the dominant
tribe in the area since 2000 B.C. They had
their first contact with Europeans — the
Spanish — in the 1500s. But it was the
Englishman Jonathan Dickinson who provided
his diary published as Jonathan Dickinson’s
Journal. On his way to Philadelphia from
Jamaica in 1696, Dickinson and his party
were shipwrecked off Jupiter Island.
The party was initially detained and
robbed by natives known as Jobe near
Jupiter Inlet before being released and
traveling up to the town of Santa Lucea in
modern-day St. Lucie County. From Santa
Lucea, they were sent to Jece, where they
met the cacique, thought to be the paramount
with survivors of another shipwreck in
their party.
Although Dickinson did not describe
the dress of women and only made a
reference to the Ais giving the women
in his parties deer hides for shawls, he
said the men wore loincloths of woven
palm leaves.
Dickinson wrote that the Ais did not
farm and primarily lived on fish, shellfish,
palmetto, cocoplum and sea grape berries.
Historians have also concluded that Ais
hunted large game, including deer and
bears, and fished with hooks made from
toe bones of deer they had killed.
After several weeks with the Ais,
26
an expansive account about them in
chief of the Ais. They also reunited
Spanish soldiers eventually
arrived in Jece and escorted
the shipwrecked parties to
St. Augustine, though several
people died along the way.
From St. Augustine, Dickinson
traveled to Charleston,
South Carolina, and reached
his destination of Philadelphia,
where he would become the
city’s mayor.
The end for the Ais was
tragic. Disease, slavery and
warfare would lead to the disappearance
of their population by 1760.
The only monuments to their history
were their middens — mounds of oyster
shells, burial items and refuse.
Early maps referred to the site believed
to be Jece as Two Mile Bluff, but it became
commonly known as Barker’s Bluff, an
apparent erroneous reference to a settler
who never lived on it.
German-born August Park lived on the
midden sometime after 1865. Gottlob
Kroegel, who homesteaded property
surrounding the hill, and his family began
living on the bluff in 1881, with Park purchasing
other land in the area.
This diorama at the Florida Museum of Natural History depicts a
typical Ais Indian scene.
Census records listed just two people
living in the area in 1860, growing to five
households by 1880.
After first living in a palmetto shanty,
Kroegel built a large frame house on the
mound. The mound contained rich soil,
and Kroegel planted beans and other
crops as well as one of the first orange
groves in the area.
City of Vero Beach 1919-2019 VeroBeach100.org
INDIAN RIVER MAGAZINE
Kroegel sold the shell mound to St.
Lucie County (of which Barker’s Bluff was
then a part — Indian River County hadn’t
been created) in 1908. A railroad spur was
built to the bluff and shell was carted off
to build local roads.
By 1913 the shell mound had been leveled,
destroying centuries of Ais history.
For years, the paramount town of Jece
was thought to be farther south from
Barker’s Bluff. But in 2010 researchers
Alan Brech and J.F. Lanham concluded
in the Florida Anthropologist that the Ais’
paramount town was indeed located at
Barker’s Bluff. They based their conclusion
on the survey of Alvaro Mexia in the
summer of 1605, asserting that earlier
locations were based on sightings of an
existing inlet instead of an inlet that had
closed at Winter Beach after 1715. F
Sources include Indian River Magazine
articles, Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal and
One Person Can Make a Difference: A Story
of Paul Kroegel and Pelican Island.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
This 1898 photograph by William Henry Jackson shows the towering Ais midden later
known as Barker’s Bluff, near what is now the Pelican Island National Refuge. The midden, or
shell refuse pile, was later used to build roads in the region and was leveled by 1913.
INDIAN RIVER MAGAZINE
The museum at Fort Caroline National Memorial displays crude
implements used by the coastal Indians of Florida.
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