A window on our past – Amelia Island Museum of History

Submitted by Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
December 3, 2015 2:15 p.m.

We have a treasure in our town, sitting in the old jail on 3rd Street – the Amelia Island Museum of History.

The area around Fernandina Beach has had several cultures from an indigenous Indian tribe to pirates to Union soldiers. Eight flags have flown over the town – Spanish, French, English and American for nations; and pirates, private armies, neighboring state governors. We have had missionaries and soldiers, adventurers and politicians. The museum has organized its collections along the long axis of history to and its docents tell the stories of these collections.

The Timucua flourished in the southeast United States from around 1100 BCE. Most of what we know about them comes from archaeological digs. Piles of empty shells and nets weighted with shells speak to their seafood diet. Some remains of their settlements and evidence of burials speak to their way of life. The museum has grave goods, axes, shell necklaces, and other artifacts that lend an idea of their daily lives.

In the early 1980s, a Jacksonville doctor bought a piece of property on the south end of Amelia Island intending to build a house. When the land clearing started, one site turned up bones. The Dorion Dig, as it was called, excavated bones and artifacts from a 17th century church graveyard. Some of these artifacts are at the museum.

In the late1970s, a boat loaded with about 25 tons of marijuana ran aground off the coast of the island. In view of their cargo, it’s not surprising that the crew deserted the ship immediately. Word spread quickly among the population and dozens of people went out to affect a rescue though their impulses may have been less than humanitarian in some cases. The police arrested some as “felonious beachcombers.” The museum has a marijuana pipe from that time.

We often hear that the social sciences are irrelevant. Our youth need to be trained in marketable skills – science, technology, engineering, mathematics. The fallacy in this argument is that we are not created instantly out of whole cloth at the time of our birth. We are a current culmination of many people, forces, environments, and history.

When you look at a shell strapped to a stick that was used for gardening a thousand years ago, you see the human mind at work devising solutions to the challenges of daily life. If we didn’t see that tool, we might assume we are the smartest creatures that have ever lived. It’s good to be reminded otherwise.

So I recommend a visit and perhaps a docent tour.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.