Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center

Weedon Island Preserve is an approximately 3,700-acre nature preserve that extends along the west side of Tampa Bay in Pinellas County, Florida. It is the largest estuarine preserve in Pinellas County, and is comprised of aquatic habitats with mangrove swamps, shoreline, and seagrass beds along the eastern edge. The landward sections contain some xeric and mesic upland communities of pine flatwoods, scrub, scrubby flatwoods, and hammocks. Visitors can hike over 5 miles of trails covering both wetland and upland habitats. The home of countless species including gopher tortoises, armadillos, native shorebirds, oyster beds, mangroves, pines, palm trees, saw palmetto, and cacti, the habitat is a special wonder in one of Florida’s most populated counties.

The extensive cultural history of the preserve helped shape the land with shell middens and mounds as well as a pine timber logging industry and the patchwork of mosquito ditches made in the mid 1900s. On June 13, 1972, Weedon Island Preserve was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. In 1974 the state of Florida purchased Weedon Island and its surrounding islands and it officially opened for public use in December 1980. In 1993, the state created a lease agreement with Pinellas County to manage and maintain the preserve. The county's Department of Parks and Conservation Resources presently manages the area.

In the years right after the Civil War, the land now known as Weedon Island was purchased by Captain W. B. Henderson and gifted to his daughter Blanche on her marriage to Dr. Leslie Weedon, a doctor from Tampa. The Weedons used the island as a weekend retreat. In 1923, Weedon sold most of the property to a real estate developer, Eugene Elliot, who advertised the land promoting its natural and archaeological resources. Elliot brought national attention to the prehistoric mounds when Jesse Walter Fewkes, of the Smithsonian Institution, did excavations in the early 1920s. The Weedon Island archaeological site is a large shell midden and burial mound complex. These excavations discovered finely made and ornately decorated mortuary vessels. Fewkes named the distinctive pottery he found decorated with punctuated and incised designs the Weeden Island Culture, and published a report in 1924 (misspelling Dr. Weedon’s name).

William Sears of the Florida State Museum investigated the site again in the 1960s. Sears excavated a small area of shell midden near the burial mound, and there he found many sherds of plain, utilitarian pottery unlike the decorated pottery type recovered by Fewkes. This difference in pottery types in mortuary and domestic contexts is a pattern found at other Weeden Island sites along the central Florida Gulf coast. Archaeologists now recognize that the Weedon Island site is well outside the heartland of the Weeden Island Culture, and was likely part of the Weeden Island-related Late Manasota Culture. The Manasota Culture developed around 500 BCE, 700 years before the development of the Weeden Island sacred complex. The secular component of the Manasota Culture had no connection with the secular components of heartland Weeden Island Cultures.

The mission of the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center is to empower citizens to make informed decisions about natural and cultural resources. Center programs interpret the natural, cultural and archaeological history of the preserve in order to demonstrate how the environment and people support and shape each other. The three-story center was designed with the help of Native Americans and keeps with their traditions. For example, the orientation of the center is along the cardinal points of the compass (north, south, east and west) with the entrance facing east. A special curved wall is representative of the remarkable pottery of the Weeden Island Culture who lived on the island some 1,000 to 1,800 years ago.

Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center features exhibits to help visitors understand natural Florida, ancient and modern peoples and how the two shaped each other. The exhibit gallery, Weedon Island Preserve: Connecting People and Place, with 6,000 square feet of interactive exhibits, appeals to all ages. When you explore these exhibits, you have the opportunity to travel underwater, through mangrove swamps and even back in time. Hidden worlds will be revealed on your journey, so pay close attention to the sights and sounds that surround you. The gallery is free and open to the public during the center's normal business hours.

In 2011, archaeologists and volunteers excavated an ancient dugout canoe from the shoreline of Weedon Island Preserve. The canoe was first discovered by a local resident in 2001. Initial arrangements to document and investigate the canoe, revealed a pine dugout canoe measuring 12.17 meters (39.9 feet), from bow to broken stern. The Weedon Island canoe is far longer than any other dugout found in Florida and is the only one directly associated with a saltwater environment. The canoe has suffered damage from mangrove roots and oyster growth, and the sides are deteriorated. Radiocarbon testing yielded a date of AD 690 – 1010. The makers of the canoe are considered to belong to the Manasota culture, a prehistoric Native American people who hunted and fished the bay, leaving shell mounds along the coast. Interpretation on how the canoe was used is still under study and analysis.

Friends of Weedon Island and the Alliance for Weedon Island Archaeological Research and Education are partners in the preservation of the canoe, a lengthy and expensive process. A specially constructed conservation tank funded by the FOWI and overseen by AWIARE held the sections of the canoe in a special bath of polyethylene glycol. Once the slow wood penetration treatment was completed, the canoe was reassembled and put on display at the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center.