SITE’S KEY TO ORLANDO HISTORY: FORT GATLIN

The impending takeover of the lakefront site of a former Navy sonar lab by the Orange County School District is breathing new life into hopes that researchers can pin down the site of Fort Gatlin once and for all.

A 1997 study by a Gainesville archaeological consulting firm turned up numerous Seminole War-era artifacts and said “it is probable” the fort had been on or adjacent to the site of the now-abandoned U.S. Naval Underwater Sound Reference facility at Summerlin and Gatlin avenues. But confirmation of the fort’s original site has never been made.

Most of the 3.4-acre property, occupied by the Navy from 1950 until 1997, could not be searched because a building and parking lot cover three-fourths of the site.

But school district officials have promised that once they move into the property, they will tear up some asphalt and let researchers do more exploratory excavating on the site, said Linda Stewart of the Fort Gatlin Historical Group, a grassroots organization that wants to preserve as much of the site as possible and document the history of the fort.

The school district is joining with the historical group and the University of Central Florida to apply for a state grant to fund further study and preservation work.

“It’s important because this is the origin of Orlando,” Stewart said.

Fort Gatlin was built in November 1838 during the Second Seminole War as part of the Army’s campaign to force the Seminoles out of Florida. It was one of a network of stockades the Army built roughly a day’s march apart throughout Central and South Florida to carry the war deeper into Seminole territory.

The fort was named for Dr. John S. Gatlin, an Army physician who was one of 104 U.S. soldiers killed in what came to be known as Dade’s Massacre, an ambush of a column of troops by Seminoles in what is now Sumter County on Dec. 28, 1835. That clash is regarded as the opening volley in the longest and bloodiest of the three Seminole wars in Florida.

What essentially became a guerrilla war lasted until 1842 without a formal treaty or victory by either side as the United States switched tactics and decided to try to crowd the tribe out by luring U.S. settlers, rather than continue to fight or try to capture the Seminoles. Hence, the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 offered 160 acres — a quarter-mile square — free to anyone who stayed five years, built a cabin, cultivated at least five acres and helped defend the area from Seminole attack.

The first of these homesteaders in present-day Orange County were brothers Aaron and Isaac Jernigan, who filed claims for adjacent parcels on the west side of Lake Holden in July 1843. The homesteads could not be nearer than two miles from a military post, so the Jernigans settled two miles northwest of Fort Gatlin.

A 1939 letter from the National Archives responding to a query from an Orlando researcher said the fort was occupied by various Army artillery and dragoon units from Nov. 9, 1838, to July 1, 1839, when it was evacuated. There are no records of the fort being garrisoned from then until Oct. 26, 1849, when an artillery company reoccupied it. But this lasted only a few weeks. A second artillery unit arrived a few days later, and both had moved on by Nov. 22.

1849 was a year of renewed Seminole uprising in Orange County. Three settlers were killed by Seminoles near the present site of Kissimmee that year, and an Orange County grand jury that October pleaded with the federal government to remove the rest of the Indians for settlers’ safety. In response to a series of Seminole raids in the late 1840s, the governor had dispatched a volunteer militia to guard settlements, but Orange grand jurors said that was not enough.

“… We desire the speedy removal of the Indians, to which both they and the government of the United States stand pledged, and that this may be done peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary,” reads the grand jury report, handwritten on the county’s oldest official record book.

Also at that time, as many as 80 of the county’s widely scattered settlers huddled for about a year in a stockade that Aaron Jernigan built on the north side of Lake Conway, according to an account penned many years later by his daughter, Martha Jernigan Tyler.

The grand jury’s report apparently referred to this stockade when it complained that settlers were “driven from their homes and forced to huddle together in hasty defences [sic].”

But the panel’s request was not granted. Sporadic Seminole raids continued, and a local volunteer militia, led by Aaron Jernigan, was mustered in 1852. Things quieted down until the decisive Third Seminole War of 1855-58 when the natives were confined to reservations in South Florida.

Orlando’s Randolph and Robinson families owned much of the land around the presumed fort site from the late 1800s until the late 1930s. The Navy bought several lots on the east side of Summerlin Avenue in 1939 — favoring the site because of Lake Gem Mary’s depth — but did not build the sonar lab until 1949-50.

For years, the Navy lab had a 3,600-square-foot steel dock extending over the lake, which held equipment used to test underwater listening abilities of ship and submarine sonar systems.

When the Navy decided in 1996 to close its research facility, an archaeological research firm was hired to study the historic significance while environmental impact studies were being done.

“Based on the recovery of several Second Seminole War[-]period artifacts, it is probable that the fort was either located within the [Navy] property or adjacent to it,” wrote Anne V. Stokes, principal investigator for Southeastern Archaeological Research Inc. of Gainesville.

But because the results were not conclusive and so much of the site had been disturbed by modern construction, the consulting firm did not recommend that the property be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Originally Published: May 7, 2000 at 12:00 AM EDT