CELEBRITY FORT

BY JANIE GOULD
PHOTOS BY ED DRONDOSKI

Mention Abner Doubleday and perhaps baseball comes to mind. And while the claim that he invented America’s pastime may be a myth, there’s no question that Doubleday was a Union general during the Civil War, that he fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter and that earlier in his military career, he was sent to the coastal Florida wilderness to quell a feared Seminole uprising.

In 1857, Capt. Doubleday and his men marched 120 miles from Fort Dallas in south Florida to Fort Capron, which the government built in what is now St. Lucie Village after Indians killed one settler and wounded another. Their orders were to “drive the Seminoles out of the country.”

He described Fort Capron as a “very quiet post” in his memoirs, “My Life in the Old Army,” which wasn’t published until 1998, more than a century after his death. He also wrote about the capture of a Seminole family by one of his officers.

“I think there was one Indian, his squaw and two children. As the troops came suddenly upon them, they all held up their right hand as a token of surrender. The Indians said to the officer when he drew near, “How do you do?’ The latter answered, ‘Thank you my health is pretty good. How are you? How would you like to go to Arkansas?’”

The Indians said Arkansas was too cold for them. Doubleday didn’t say whether the family was forced to move west, but he did discuss the economics of Indian removal.

“I am afraid if the statistics of the money spent in Florida were made out it could easily have cost more than $100,000 to kill or capture one Indian,” he wrote. “I believe it would have been much cheaper to let the matter out by contract.”

The government built Fort Capron after an Indian attack caused panicky settlers to flee. A handful of families, known as the Indian River Colony, had moved in to tame the Florida wilderness. The government had declared victory in the Second Seminole War, and then enacted the Armed Occupation Act. Settlers were offered land in return for defending the land from any Seminole uprisings.

“Armed occupation, with land to the occupant, is the true way of settling and holding a conquered country,” Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton said.

In their 2007 book, “The Indian River Colony: Armed Occupation Act Settlers on the Treasure Coast,” authors Linda Hudson and Jean Ellen Wilson describe the killing of settler John Barker and wounding of his brother-in-law William Russell, by four Indians.

The news spread quickly, and unlike the intrepid pioneers of American folklore, the Indian River settlers didn’t even try to hold their ground.

“Sails on the river must have appeared like the wings of flushed birds as the frightened homesteaders fled north to New Smyrna and St. Augustine and south to Key West,” they wrote. “They were not the Right Stuff of Indian-fighting pioneers.”

Later, some of the colonists returned with Army troops sent to build Fort Capron, which was named for an artillery officer killed in 1847 in the Mexican War. Hudson and Wilson quote from letters written by settler Caleb Brayton, who described the construction scene as “a new England village, all is bustle and activity.”

Breton said he thought the government would keep the Indians cut off from contact with the whites so that they “will have no alternative but to starve or emigrate. Already are they meeting the troops as they are crossing the country and begging for tobacco, salt and etc.”

Fort Capron was situated on the west banks of the Indian River, across from the strategically important Indian River Inlet, which is long gone. According to Brayton, 500 officers and men were posted there.

Historian Lucille Rights, author of the 1994 book, “A Portrait of St. Lucie County, Florida,” did research about the fort at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

“I did find out that they never had battles there, but the soldiers did map-making,” she said. “The area to the west in Florida was uncharted territory.”

Fort Capron’s location was blessed in many ways, according to historian Anne Sinnott, former education director at the St. Lucie County Historical Museum and a village resident. The easterly breeze and a nearby freshwater spring produced a healthier environment than in many other early military installations in Florida, she said.

Researchers have documented the existence of several hundred forts in Florida, from the early colonial period when the French, Spanish and English occupied the territory, through the Seminole wars and then the Civil War. One of the more miserable sounding places was Fort Center, where Maj. Gen. Alex Webb wrote, in 1853: “The stagnant rain water I have drank for nine weeks is rather hard stuff and would not quench my thirst at all today.”

Fort Capron was abandoned in 1859 and the buildings have vanished. A monument at Indian River Drive and Chamberlin Boulevard marks its approximate location. But evidence of the fort remains. Archeologists have found old horseshoes, musket balls, pottery pieces, and dishes in Sinnott’s yard in St. Lucie Village. Her sons once dug up some brass military buttons.

The Indian River Colony vanished, too, but not because of the Seminoles. Instead, the Civil War caused some of the settlers to return to their original homes and take sides, Hudson and Wilson wrote.

Doubleday wrote about going to Fort Capron in 1853 with fellow officer George Pickett for a court-martial. Pickett has an enduring place in American history, but not because of anything that happened at Fort Capron. In 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg, he led the famous Confederate assault known as Pickett’s Charge. It proved disastrous for the South, causing Gen. Robert E. Lee to abandon his plan to march on Washington by way of Pennsylvania.

Doubleday went on to invent, of all things, the San Francisco cable car. In 1905, a newspaper declared him to be the inventor of baseball, but that was a claim that he never made.