Minding the Mounds: Sams House

 

    Next on our list is the Sams House burial mound in Merritt Island. We started the trip by visiting the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa. They have a fantastic exhibit of the Windover excavation and a bust of what one of the people found may have looked like when they were alive. They also feature a Mastodon and Giant Ground Sloth replica of the fossils which were discovered in Florida that inhabited this State thousands of years ago. After the museum, we made our way to Sams House and when we arrived, we went to see the 600-square-foot cabin that once housed 10 people in 1878. Sams House is Brevard County’s oldest standing home.  

In 1875 the cabin was taken apart and floated up the Indian Lagoon River to be reassembled where it is today. In 1888, they built the larger white house that is next to it and tore down the previous three rooms in the cabin into one spacious room. Afterward, it would have been used as a school than a church for the people that colonized the area. There is a rock path that stretches around 300 feet from the house that leads you to the burial mound that was partially excavated in 1895.  

C.B. Moore was the archaeologist that excavated the burial mound on this site. He visited hundreds of mounds across the country during his career. His focus on the mounds along the St. John’s River is seen as his most notable work by scholars today. At the Sams House site, Moore found some Indigenous remains at the top but that is as far as he went. Unfortunately, it is prohibited to see the mound from other angles but from the front, it appears to be around seven feet tall. There were many mosquitos and birds active in this area. There is not much information on the mound itself nor about the Indigenous people that inhabited the land, which was disappointing since their whole story is seemingly forgotten. 

 For lunch, we stopped at Pozzy Bros Pizza in Merritt Island and the food was absolutely delicious. We also walked around Cocoa Village and went into the shops and got some souvenirs. One of my favorite things so far on these trips is to visit the local small businesses. Though there is little information on the mound, it was still a pleasure to be able to visit it and get insight into our history and heritage it has to offer.  

 

Sources: 

Mitchem, Jeffrey M. “The East Florida Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore.” East Florida Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Mo - University of Alabama Press, http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/East-Florida-Expeditions-of-Clarence-Bloomfield-Mo,973.aspx. 

Mitchem, Jeffrey M. “Clarence Bloomfield Moore (1852–1936).” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 15 Oct. 2019, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/clarence-bloomfield-moore-574/. 

Photos and text by Julie-Marie Alvarez