History
Florida Museum of Natural History
Artist’s Rendering of Fort Center
|
The name Fisheating Creek is derived from the Creek Thlothlopopka-hatchee meaning “the creek where fish are eaten.”
The first known settlement occurred along the banks of Fisheating Creek
between 1000 and 500 BC. The early inhabitants, known as the Belle Glade
people, began building mounds and other earthworks and subsisted by
netting fish and harvesting turtles, snakes, and alligators. According
to University of Florida archeologist Jerald Milanich, who worked on
the area as a student in the 1960s, perforations found on turtle shells
indicate turtles were tethered to be eaten as needed. The creek was
more than a source of food and water. It was also a canoe highway leading
to Lake Okeechobee and its resources to the east and other settlements
to the west.
Florida Museum of Natural History
Eagle carving from Fort Center excavation
|
The Fort Center site consists of mounds, ponds, circular ditches, and
linear embankments built over at least 2000 years. William Sears, director
of the excavation and author of Fort Center: An Archeological Site
in the Lake Okeechobee Basin, believes that corn pollen found in
one of the three overlapping basins indicates that the Belle Glade people
grew corn. If true, Fort Center would be one of the earliest, if not
the earliest, example of agriculture in the pre-Columbian Eastern United
States. Sears theorizes that people dug ditches to drain the soil for
corn, which will not grow in wet soils, and that this practice may have
spread across the Caribbean or around the Gulf from the lowlands of
Mexico.
At the site, bundles of human remains were found along with the remnants
of a wooden platform decorated with wooden carvings of wildlife including
life-size cats, a bear, foxes, eagles, and wading birds. Other objects
were preserved in the muck at the bottom of the pond including a wooden
carving of an otter running with a fish in its mouth. The site, listed
in the National Register of Historic Places, was still occupied, although
there was no evidence of agriculture, when the Europeans arrived in
the 16th and 17th centuries.
During the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), a cabbage palm palisade
at the site was named Fort Center for Lieutenant J.P. Center. Oscen
Tustenuggee, who had organized many war parties, and his two bothers
Micco Tustenuggee and Old Tustenuggee and their wives lived in villages
along the creek. In 1842, George Henry Preble of the U.S. Navy described
the difficulties of a trip up Fisheating Creek in a 30-foot cypress
dugout canoe named “Susan” after his sweetheart: “This
stream is very tortuous, and sometimes swells into a river, and then
dwindles into a brook.”
Florida Photo Archives
Traveling on Fisheating Creek, 1842.
|
The fort was reactivated at the start of the Third Seminole War in 1855. Lieutenant Henry Benson described Fort Center upon his arrival in April 1855 as “more disagreeable, unhealthy and devoid of interest than I had expected….Mosquitos awful. 1,000,000,000 of them….Hot-hot as fire all day.” His diary concludes with “the same in the same. Killed two snakes.” At the conclusion of the Third Seminole War in 1858, many Indians had been removed from Florida. In 1881, Clay MacCauley at the direction of the federal government found 37 extended families living in 22 campsites in five areas, one of which was Fisheating Creek. By 1930, cultivation of sugar cane, cattle ranching, and establishment of a refinery at Moore Haven forced the remaining Seminoles to move from Fisheating Creek. Some Seminoles went to work for cattle barron Jacob Summerlin.
Much of the land surrounding the creek came to be owned by the Lykes Brothers. The Lykes Empire began in the 1880s when Dr. Howell Tyson Lykes began exporting cattle to Cuba. All seven of his sons went into the family cattle or shipping business, and today Lykes Brothers Inc. is the largest producer of cattle and the biggest meat packer in Florida.
Over the years the creek has been the focal point in the lives of the local people. They courted, married, honeymooned, and baptized their children there. Along the banks they colored and hid Easter eggs and celebrated Thanksgiving. They depended on the creek for subsistence and recreation, hunting, fishing, and camping along its banks.
Florida Photo Archives
|
The Lykes family prohibited development along the creek and ran a campground
and a canoeing concession at Palmdale. In 1989, the Lykes Brothers closed
the creek to the public, igniting a 10-year legal battle. On February
19, 1998, Circuit Court Judge Charles Carlton ruled that Fisheating
Creek belonged to the people of Florida, although the ordinary high
water line, which is used to determine the boundary between public lands
and private lands, had not been determined. Lykes Brothers appealed
the decision. To put an end to litigation, the parties agreed to a settlement
calling for the state of Florida to purchase a corridor along the creek
under the auspices of the Conservation and Recreation Lands (CARL) Program
using funds appropriated by the Florida Forever Act. This land (18,272
acres) became Fisheating Creek WMA. The settlement agreement has a number
of stipulations that determine recreational use on the area including
prohibition of motor vehicles, jet skis, and jet-powered watercraft;
hunting west of U.S. 27 by quota permit only; prohibition of hunting
east of U.S. 27 except for special opportunity spring turkey hunts;
and restriction of airboats from portions of Cowbone Marsh.
