Horr’s Island

SOUTHWEST FLORIDA IS A HOTSPOT FOR HISTORY LOVERS. BUT NOT EVERY ATTRACTION DRAWS THE SAME ATTENTION AS THE RINGLING MUSEUM IN SARASOTA... OR EDISON FORD WINTER ESTATES IN FORT MYERS. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GO OFF THE BEATEN PATH TO FIND SOMETHING TRULY UNIQUE. AS PART OF AN UPCOMING PROGRAM... W-G-C-U'S DOCUMENTARY UNIT WAS ABLE TO TRACK DOWN A HIDDEN GEM... TUCKED AWAY IN MARCO ISLAND. <And this is really a secret. This is a secret spot. This is a secret spot. Yeah. So this site is publicly accessible. There's a public easement, but it's in a private gated community. So unless, you know, you would never think to try and find this site, they're not advertising that you can come back here and see this historic property. The home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. To see the site, we had paid a $10 fee to drive inside the luxurious Key Marco community between Marco Island and Goodland. This was built for Captain John Horr, who is a captain from the Union Army who settles down here. There is a pineapple plantation here at the time. According to the historic register description, pineapple production in South Florida began in 1860. There were several produce plantations around Marco. The property was believed to be a vacation retreat for Horr and his family. They lived in Key West, where Horr operated a grocery business and held various positions, including as U.S. Marshal. What's compelling about the home now is how it was constructed. It's actually a tabby structure. What it is, is you have different material that's actually mixed in to create that kind of like, again, that like early kind of concrete. So what we have mixed in here are of course, all the shell and the other archaeological material that would have been plentiful in this area. So we see that reuse of the archaeological Calusa material here in this historic house. This whole island is actually very archaeologically rich. So in trying to pull the site file for the other site, my colleague was like, oh, which one do you need? So anyone that's building, you know, their house here has to do an archaeological investigation. If they're adjacent to a known site just to document that, they're not going to impact the archaeological site or to try and document what is actually here. For WGCU News, I'm Janine Zeitlin.>