BULLSEYE
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MAP C: THE OLD STONE WHARF and the town’s buildings appear in a different configuration than Map B. Note the colonists’ duplex houses 1 and 2 (bottom right along the shoreline). These “farm houses” are 522 feet apart, with each 10th house being an over seer’s house. The map indicates, “The dotted line is the road from one house to another with mulberry trees planted on each side.”
GABORDY CANAL, looking east toward South Riverside Drive, In the 1920s. Perhaps a fiction, oral history suggests the Turnbull women were set to enlarging this existing creek to create an extensive citywide drainage and Irrigation network. The men were assigned the harder task of digging the Canal Street canal through layers of the rock-hard coquina. (Photo by F.C. Van de Sande) GABORDY (OR SOUTH) CANAL: Today you can view this historic site from the South Riverside Drive bridge at the city limits of New Smyrna Beach and Edgewater. This natural feature was enlarged by the colonists. Map B explains, “A Drain to carry off the Water from ye ponds at ye back of the Hammock Land” A hammock describes Florida “land with an elevation above swamps, covered with hardwood trees”. West of town this map notes: “Woods not yet cleared.” |
INDIGO VAT SITES were scattered throughout Tumbull’s Smyrnéa. Great emphasis was placed on indigo cultivation; this was the main cash crop for the proprietors of this agrarian colony. By all accounts, it was also an unpleasant, smelly process to extract the blue dye from the indigo plant. OLD STONE WHARF is located in the 700 block of South Riverside Drive, north of Clinch Street. A Daughters of
the American Revolution monument marks the site. At low tide you can still see the ruins of two coquina piers between modem private docks. This was landfall for the colonists as well as the center of commerce in the Smyrnéa Settlement. What remains over 230 years later are two piers made of coquina blocks averaging 20” x 30” x 8”. They are 45 feet apart and extend into the river over 80 feet. The town’s buildings must have been substantial, too. A core of 11 buildings shows 26 years. later on a crude 1803 survey map of Ambrose Hull’s colony during the Second Spanish period [1783 – 1821]. |
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CANAL STREET IS MISSING ITS CANAL: Turnbull had learned Egyptian irrigation methods in the Nile River delta. He was one of the of the first to introduce “the Egyptian’s mode of watering” to the New World. However, the canal for which Canal Street was named is not shown on Maps A, B or C because it had not yet been dug in 1770. |
By August 1768 all the colonists were finally settled in New Smyrna. Naturally, the first task was to feed and house them. Provisions had been made for 500, not the 1,255 who arrived. A rebellion broke out within two weeks and was suppressed. Only scarcity seemed to be plentiful. |