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Marking time

With a chance discovery at a construction site, a piece of Weedon Island history comes full circle.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published December 10, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - The people who stole the tombstones probably knew about the rattlesnakes. Even now, they're plentiful at Weedon Island Preserve in Pinellas County. If you haven't seen one in the 3,164-acre park, it's because you've stayed on the asphalt.

Percy Ross and Lorenzo Ross were buried in rattlesnake territory. Percy was 16 when he passed away in 1884. His father, a Civil War veteran, joined his son in the next world four years later. They were interred side by side among the slash pines and saw palmettos.

Those who carried the tombstones to the funerals must have kept their eyes peeled for those big diamondbacks. Whoever stole the stones decades later no doubt did the same.

In 1964, vandals disrupted the Rosses' long rest. They yanked the heavy markers out of the earth, lumbered through the palmettos with their trophies and probably hauled them away in a truck.

It was a whodunit that made the newspapers and TV. Then the bad deed was forgotten. Not by everybody, of course. People who cared about Weedon Island's colorful history always wondered about the stolen tombstones. When the island became a preserve, rangers even erected new grave markers on the road. The new stones didn't mark the location of the actual bodies. They were pizazz for the tourists.

Nobody ever saw a sign of the real tombstones again.

Until recently, that is. That's when a guy in Tampa started clearing land with a backhoe.

Fruitful, harsh land

Archaeologists have documented 7,000 years of human history on Weedon Island. One of those humans was Lorenzo Dow Ross, according to information compiled by the Daughters of the Confederacy for the Weedon preserve.

He was born in 1836 in what is now Hillsborough County. He grew up most likely in Tampa, though it was called Fort Brooke at the time. It was a safe haven in the latest war with unruly Seminoles who refused to yield Florida to white people.

When he was 20, Ross joined the Army and fought the Seminoles in their final war with the U.S. government. After his discharge, he moved to the Weedon peninsula to farm potatoes, corn and citrus. He apparently was a man of action. On March 10, 1862, he grabbed his rifle and enlisted in Company B in the 7th Florida Infantry of the Confederacy. Captured the following year in Tennessee, he spent the remainder of the war in federal prison.

Returning home after Appomattox, he married one of Weedon Island's few eligible women, Inez Hart, in 1866. They moved to the southernmost tip of the property, known today as Ross Island. They farmed and had six children.

Weedon Island was a fruitful yet harsh place in which to live, cold in the winter and hot and wet in the summer, a land best suited for mosquitoes, sand flies, rattlers and folks looking for an early grave. Yet a good man with a spear, net and gun could feed a family.

The boy, Percy Ross, died as a teenager in what was called a hunting accident. We don't know if he was slain by another hunter or shot while cleaning his gun. His father's death four years later was as mysterious. Lorenzo's passing was blamed on "food poisoning," though there is no record of whether he swallowed a bad oyster or a rancid hunk of wild hog.

Weedon goes bust

In 1924, the Smithsonian Institution began excavating prehistoric Indian mounds on the land, now owned by Leslie Weedon. Archaeologists discovered tools, weapons and intricate pottery. They uncovered thousands of human bones buried by the first Floridians in large hills constructed with oyster shells.

The discoveries were considered important in the annals of American archaeology. Even so, the Smithsonian's Jesse Walter Fewkes managed to misspell Weedon's name in his report. Even today, history books talk about the "Weeden" culture.

At the time of the archaeological dig, Florida was enjoying a land boom. Weedon's Indian history, perhaps inevitably, was touted as a tourist attraction. Other ambitious plans for Weedon called for housing developments, an airport and Florida's first movie studio, Kennedy City, according to Sheila K. Stewart's paper, "Mythic Landscapes of the Boom and Bust Weedon Island," for Florida Historical Quarterly.

Seaplanes used the airport. Silent film star Buster Keaton arrived to make a picture, The Fisherman, on May 30, 1933. He left two months later without acting a lick. Nobody knows whether his advancing alcoholism or the snakes and mosquitoes of Weedon Island were to blame for his abrupt departure.

Over the years, everything changed. The airport closed, the movie studio failed and developers found more agreeable property.

Weedon Island's lonely roads began collecting abandoned sofas and rusty bicycles. Amateur archaeologists, meanwhile, dug up museum-quality Indian artifacts and bones with impunity. At night, teenagers showed up in jalopies to neck. During the day, vandals set the woods on fire, rumbled and shot rattlesnakes with their rifles.

Then, in late October 1964, somebody stole the tombstones of Lorenzo and Percy Ross. Hikers ambling through the woods discovered the bad deed. Most folks assumed it was a Halloween prank.

A historian, Ralph Reed, pulled on his snake boots - "I believe there are lots of snakes on the island. They always live where there are lots of rabbits to feed on." - and searched in vain for the missing stones.

Lost and found

The telephone rang in the office of Phyllis Kolianos one morning last month. An archaeologist, she's the manager of the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Nature Center. She loves the place, even the rattlesnakes. Not long ago, she saw one slithering across a path.

After she put the phone down, she fetched a burly worker and drove across the Gandy Bridge in his pickup truck. In Tampa, they turned on S Manhattan, passing a Jiffy Lube on their way to a construction site a few blocks away.

A developer, Inland Homes, was building a condominium complex. It was a busy place, full of orange marker flags and earth-moving equipment. A few days before, a worker had been leveling ground with a backhoe. The hoe struck something, a big boulder, maybe. The worker climbed off the hoe and saw a tombstone.

"Percy F. Ross," it said.

The workers didn't know what to do. They even considered doing nothing. But a foreman, Don Bradshaw Jr., told the crew to put the tombstone in a shed for safekeeping. It took several men and some machinery to move it. "Thing must weigh 600 pounds," Bradshaw declared. "It must have taken some strong men to bring it here."

That night, Bradshaw had trouble sleeping. He left bed to play on his computer. He typed the name "Percy Ross" and "Weedon Island" into the Web browser.

"Whoa!" he said.

Now Kolianos has the granite tombstone at the preserve. She is still deciding what the preserve should do with it. She might place it on the site of the actual grave. Or it may end up in the preserve's museum. In the meantime, she hopes that the other tombstone is discovered at the construction site.

Over in Tampa, Bradshaw says his men will continue looking for a stone marked "Lorenzo Dow Ross," but he is pessimistic. The crews have finished the serious earth-moving.

"I just want to know what kind of people would steal a tombstone," he said. "It ain't right."

Bradshaw, 42, lost his own father, Don, last March. His dad, who was 66, worked for a company that assists drivers whose cars break down on the interstate. He was helping at an accident on I-275 when he was mowed down by a driver later charged with DUI manslaughter.

"I haven't buried my father yet," Bradshaw was saying the other day. "I have his ashes in an urn. I haven't decided what to do with them. When the time comes, I'll put them in a safe place."

Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at (727) 893-8737 or klink@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 9, 2006, 20:35:57]