One trowel at a time

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Posted July 17, 2024 | By Susan Smiley-Height, susan@magnoliamediaco.com / Photos by Bruce Ackerman, bruce@ocalagazette.com

Although Hurricane Gladys blew through Ocala on Oct. 19, 1968, the name of the Category 2 storm remains on the lips of archaeologists interested in what lies below ground at the Fort King National Historic Landmark.

Almost 56 years later, professionals from the Gulf Archaeological Research Institute, or GARI, along with three students and a handful of devoted volunteers, are continuing to search for answers related to a cache of more than 130 bottles that were recovered at the site after Gladys toppled a tree and a young boy spotted the array of whiskey, beer and champagne vessels.

From July 15 to 19, two teams have been diligently excavating “units” at the site that align with historic photos from the time of the find. They hope to not only find more artifacts such as bottles, but perhaps even trowel up information about some kind of structure that may have been at the site of the treasure trove. On Saturday, July 20, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., members of the community are invited to join the search during Public Archaeology Day and learn what has been discovered during this excavation.

The national landmark located at 3925 E. Fort King St. in Ocala, which includes the Fort King Visitor Center and Archaeological Resource Center, is owned jointly by the city of Ocala and Marion County. The Fort King Heritage Foundation has a mission of preserving, protecting and promoting the national landmark site while serving as a citizen support group to cultivate and sustain a public-private partnership with private donors and local, state and federal governments.

According to the city of Ocala’s website, “Fort King was a typical U.S. Army frontier fort and a noteworthy symbol of the longest and costliest war America had with its native people—the Second Seminole War. Fort King is a narrative that speaks of a complicated history as relates to the occupation of the State of Florida and beyond. It is the story of a young country struggling to thrive and of native inhabitants trying to survive. Fort King also played a vital role in the birthplace of Marion County and the city of Ocala. After the war, the fort became the county seat and housed the first courthouse and location for public assembly in the newly formed Marion County.”

The 42-acre park features a replica fort and a newly built blacksmith shop. Numerous special events are held there, such as a Historic Homesteading Soap Making class on Aug. 17, and the Festival at Fort King, set for Dec. 7 and 8, which will include living historians and historic themed crafts, games and workshops.

MEET THE TEAMS

Working at the site this week were GARI Executive Director Michelle Sivilich, Ph.D.; Research Associate Colin Parkman, Ph.D.; Research Associate Stephanie Bauman; and Research Associate Dan Sivilich, Michelle’s father and a noted battlefield archaeologist. The students are Clint Gallant, Dylan Rice and Maraiya Sanchez; the volunteers are Cadence Martin and Scott Dermodi.

Gallant’s father, Gene Gallant, was a reporter for the “Ocala Star-Banner” in 1968 and wrote about young Bobby McCall finding the bottles. In an article dated Oct. 20, 1968, he notes that, “Hurricane Gladys, while leaving a path of destruction behind her in the Marion County area, also showed her fickle minded nature by uncovering a cache of old wine and whiskey bottles dating back to the Seminole War era. The initial cache was revealed when high winds uprooted an ancient pine tree at Dr. Wayne McCall’s home on the site of old Ft. King.”

“My dad is a native Floridian, native Marion Countian. I’m a seventh generation Ocalan,” said Clint Gallant. “When the hurricane tree fell over, Dr. McCall contacted my dad because he knew he was into history, and he was also a reporter for the ‘Star-Banner.’ It was my father, Ben Waller and Jack Dowdy who excavated the original site. My dad was really big on history. He was on historical boards and committees for years and volunteered at the Silver River Museum until he passed. He always wanted to come back here and finish.”

Gallant said researchers have found “all kinds of stuff, such as a bunch of glass pieces and some buttons, which can tell you the regiment because they are specific to different branches of the military. It’s stuff that needs to be preserved. So many people don’t really care about history anymore. It’s all about now, now, now and the future. I’ve seen the future; I’d rather live in the past. It’s an honor to be here.”

Rice, who recently graduated from the College of Central Florida and is now attending the University of Central Florida, was delighted to be able to pursue his interests in his own backyard.

“I am a history major and specialize in what is going to probably end up with me doing a good deal of this work in the future. My areas of specialization are military history and dating military artifacts, so I do plenty of work with, say, rifles. I do demonstrations at the Silver River Museum. I was looking around for places I could help because for someone who is trying to break into the history industry, it can be a bit hard. You’ve got to start somewhere, and this is right here, and it is a military fort.”

Sanchez shared that she is an anthropology student and “I have a really deep interest in archaeology as a career path, so I’m here to get some experience.” She said learned about Fort King when she had lunch with Gary Ellis, founder of GARI a couple of months ago.

“He gave me a pamphlet and said I should join this program to see if archaeology is really what I want to do,” she noted.

Dan Sivilich, who lives in Ocala, has a degree is in chemical engineering with “a near master’s in computer science.”

“Back in the ‘80s in New Jersey, I bought a metal detector, wandered into a farm field looking for coins and found musket balls. I accidentally found the epicenter of the Battle of Monmouth, which was June 28, 1778, so I’ve been working battlefield archaeology since then. I do all the computer work here and run the museum on Fridays and Saturdays.’’

He has been involved with the “BattleField Detectives” television show on the History Channel and is the author of “Musket Ball and Small Shot Identification – A Guide.”

“As you can see, my father was involved as a metal detectorist in battlefield archaeology, so I grew up with it,” Michelle Sivilich noted. “When I was doing my Ph.D. at USF (University of South Florida) I ended up meeting Gary Ellis and started working with him throughout my dissertation. I took a little detour up to Virginia for a number of years and then came back to Florida.”

She said that Martin is a high school student who wants to go into archaeology, “so she took our first class and she’s been volunteering here at Fort King on the weekends for a while now and on our excavations when she can with her school studies.”

“Scott loved the class so much he just stayed, and Stephanie took the class and really fit in with us and has some archaeology experience, so we snatched her up to be one of us,” Sivilich added.

One of the first students to take the class was Tom Coleman, who is on the board of directors with the Fort King Heritage Foundation.

“I decided to fulfill a lifelong interest in history and apply to participate in an archaeological excavation. After an exciting and enlightening week involving the excavation of an archaeological site at Fort King, I fulfilled that passion. Besides the thrill of uncovering artifacts from the fort’s past, there was a great deal of education about the processes of the science,” he wrote in an email to the “Gazette.”

“Almost immediately, my dream was challenged because my techniques were undeveloped. I struggled to get the skills down, but Michelle, Dan, Gary and Colin from Gulf Archaeology and Research Institute were very patient and helpful in taming our shovel and trowel techniques. At first, I was digging too deep, which could result in damage or destruction of valuable evidence of the fort’s history. The research included marking and labeling exact locations of items that were discovered. Artifacts we uncovered included military buttons, nails, brick, bottle parts, and a still unidentified metal object. An exciting look into the history of Fort King,” he stated.

“All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Marion County. Gulf Archaeology provided wonderful, hands-on exposure to the scientific strategies for uncovering the past. The group will be providing teaching and engaged participation for others in the future. I would highly recommend this educational endeavor to all interested members of our community. Let’s make Marion County a rich cultural center for all to enjoy,” Coleman wrote.

 

PRODUCTIVE PARTNERSHIP

GARI, which Ellis founded in 1995, is a 501(C)(3) scientific research group based in Crystal River. It is professionally staffed by research associates who all hold advanced graduate degrees in a variety of fields, from anthropology to paleopathology to meteorology. Michelle Sivilich said GARI has been helping out on the Fort King property since the early 1990s.

“The community always knew Fort King’s location as some of the buildings were extant in the very early 1900s. Our founder, Gary Ellis, was integral in helping pin down the location of the first fort in the early ‘90s and then we came out in 2008 and did a lot of survey work, just kind of assessing what’s on the property and then we did all of the archaeology to reconstruct the fort and we just finished up the archaeology on the blacksmith shop, which allowed the city to reconstruct the shop,” she said.

As for working now to discover if there was some sort of structure under or near where the bottle cache was discovered in 1968, she added, “This has been a fun, special project that I’ve been dying to do for a long time because it is such a pivotal point of Ocala history. To be in a historic neighborhood and have 42-plus acres of history preserved is amazing. Not many of the Seminole War forts are as preserved as this one, so we’re really fortunate.”

“At the beginning of 2024, GARI launched the Fort King Field Experience program, which is a paid program that allows participants to come and learn what it takes to be an archaeologist by working side-by-side with us to try and re-locate the location where these bottles came from,” Sivilich explained. “Funds raised from this class are directly used to continue excavations at Fort King and allow us to keep the research going. As a nonprofit, we rely on grants and donations to conduct our work. In tandem with this project, we are conducting an oral history project where we are interviewing anyone who had heard about the bottle discovery or may have been present at the time. Through these interviews we have uncovered interesting new tidbits, including that there were many bottles left in-situ (at the original place) and only the ones disturbed by the pine tree falling were recovered.

“With this project we hope to discover what this building may have been used for, why so many bottles were left behind, and learn more about the unusually rare cellar. Our aim is to create a traveling exhibit showcasing the bottles and the stories of the residents and their descendants to preserve this critical piece of Ocala history. One can argue that it was this single discovery that really motivated the community to preserve and interpret Fort King’s story, and I want to capture the remembrances of that generation before it is too late.”

 

CAN YOU DIG IT?

At the site on Monday, the two teams worked diligently, removing layers of soil a shovel-full at a time, or by “troweling” soil and other matter into plastic scoops that were emptied into plastic buckets. The buckets were dumped onto metal mesh squares that allowed most of the material to filter down to the ground while some remnants remained on top to be examined.

Martin and Dermodi picked through one bucket’s detritus and found small bits of glass and some tiny pieces of metal.

At the other unit, Sanchez discovered a piece of glass that turned out to be the neck of a bottle. She gently used her trowel to remove some soil from around the protruding edge before asking Gallant to join her inside the unit. He used a paint brush to carefully sweep away more dirt. When asked by this reporter, “Clint, what you got there?” Sanchez quickly replied, “A bottle I found!”

“There’s always some rivalry between the units… my find is better than yours, I found something better,” Michelle Sivilich said with a laugh.

“There is a lot of technique into proper troweling. We do soil matches to a book of colors, we draw them out and take photographs and everything is really documented because you can only dig this once and, 100 years from now, if people want to reanalyze our data, we have to make sure we wrote everything down so people can say, ‘Oh, I  see what they saw and I understand why they made this conclusion.’ It’s not just about putting artifacts into the museum, it’s the data,” she said more seriously.

“Every time we come back, we always dig on the same grid. We are excavating in 5-foot by 5-foot units and we’re taking them down layer by layer by layer so we can really understand what’s going on because there’s a lot of complex stratography here. We have a lot of tree root disturbance, rodent disturbance, but we also have some really interesting features popping up, some charcoal, some clay spots here, which indicates like a structure or building material, so we’re interested to see what that turns out to be. Now we have survey points, and we can tie this into real world coordinates and put it into the computer and put it on a spatial map like Google Earth. Once you have taken it out, you can never really go back to where it was. So, the artifact doesn’t tell the story, it’s the pattern … like the blacksmith shop, we were finding some slag and clinker up in that area and we didn’t see that anywhere else on the property. If you were finding dishes and windows glass and more personal items, you could say it was more of a domestic structure. So, it’s those patterns that are important to us,” she outlined.

 

THE FORT AND ITS CITY

We asked Samantha Jarvis, an outdoor/historical resource archaeologist with the city of Ocala’s Recreation and Parks Department, how the city is a partner in the archaeological endeavor and the fort.

“The city of Ocala oversees the site maintenance, volunteer program and educational programming within the fort, the museums, and trail systems within the 40+ acre property. Partnering with GARI’s professional team, we can interpret their findings and preserve history from when and where the city itself began,” she wrote.

“Through providing living history reenactments, lectures, craft and skills classes, and field trips to all students within the surrounding area, the city aims to teach and promote the importance of the Second Seminole War. Creating new exhibits and tactile experiences will help keep history alive and relevant for all future generations that visit. Fort King is one of the very few completely reconstructed buildings that offer recreational access seven days a week to the community. We hope that folks come out to learn about early military life, Seminole culture, and natural Florida flora and fauna as well,” she added.

As for public involvement, she said, “Alongside the field school, we are thrilled to host public days that are open to all ages and interests! Come get your hands dirty and sift through the soil, learn about new technologies for dating artifacts, and make some networking connections for your future internships. I have always been a firm believer in providing citizen science initiatives and having the field school is a wonderful opportunity to teach STEM methodology, as well as contribute to historical preservation and discovery. There is also the rising trend of heritage tourism and being a good driver for our local economy and city notoriety for Florida travel.”

The Fort King Visitor Center and Archaeological Resource Center are open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. The park is open seven days a week from sunrise to sunset or 7 p.m., whichever comes first.

To learn more, call (352) 368-5533 or visit ocalafl.gov/government/city-departments-i-z/recreation-parks/fort-king-national-historic-landmark, ftking.org and gulfarchaeology.org

 

IF YOU GO

A Public Archaeology Day at the Fort King National Historic Landmark, at 3925 E. Fort King St., Ocala, will take place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 20. It is free to attend.

The next GARI Fort King Field Experience class will take place Oct. 7-11. To learn more, go to gulfarchaeology.org/classes