Led by the University of West Florida Archaeology Institute, the search is on for Fort Kirkland, an early to mid-1800s fortification in north Okaloosa County that was burned down and lost to history. A significant part of the project is identifying where to look for the fort. And, that’s where Jennifer Melcher’s GIS in Anthropology class comes in.
Melcher is a faculty research associate in the Archaeology Institute, specializing in the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology for research in fields such as anthropology and archaeology.
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For several weeks now, the students have been applying what they’re learning about GIS mapping to the Fort Kirkland project.
“Fortunately, we've got about 15 students in the class working on it. So each of them have got a map, and they're going to work with that map,” Melcher said. “Then we’ll work on digitizing the roadways and the towns and all those features off of those maps, so we can pull all that data together and really see where things start to overlap.”
The students are georeferencing old 1800s maps found in state and national archives, including the Library of Congress and the National Archives. In conjunction with historical records, they’re trying to zero in on a location about five miles north of the City of Crestview, where a man named Caleb Kirkland lived briefly during the period of the Second Creek War and Second Seminole War.
“We know that Caleb Kirkland gets into Florida in the early 1830s, maybe 1833 or 1836 or thereabouts,” said Melcher. “He joined the militia in 1837, so this is probably fortified sometime in 1837. Then we know he’s gone and gets a homestead up in Alabama, near Dothan, around 1840.”
Making the search for the site more difficult is the fact that Kirkland’s occupation of the area was very short, there were no maps from that time period to speak of, and the maps that are available are very broad in nature.
For this particular project, Melcher’s class is adding control or data points — basically, geographical features and landmarks — in an effort to match up Panhandle maps, before and after the target period, in effort to match them up with current maps. This will help them understand changes to the landscape over time, such as when Eglin Air Force Base was added to Okaloosa County’s modern landscape.
“By going back and looking at historic maps and fitting those over Eglin, we can see where there are roads, paths, little marks on the landscape that might help us identify a potential location,” she stated. “And by bringing all that data together in a computer system, we can really narrow down hopefully a search location.”
During a class in mid-February, students conducting the GIS mapping are seated in front of large computer screens, working on the various maps they’ve been assigned, as Melcher looked on.
She offered some instruction to graduate student Elizabeth White, who’s working on a map of the Gulf of Mexico, now also referred to as the Gulf of America, that dates back to 1863.
After identifying White’s original map, Melcher makes a couple of suggestions.
White acknowledges that she was a little unsure of herself at the beginning.
“The first step is to get this aligned properly,” she said of the process. “We’re just trying to find points on one map that can correlate to the other map."
Across the room, junior anthropology student Jonah Ramby is working from an 1823 map of the region.
“I'm currently adding control points at prominent geological factors like river entrances, bays, that kind of stuff,” Ramby stated. “Then I'm trying to match it up to where it'll fit according to what we know of as Florida today.”
According to Melcher, one of their biggest potential clues is a small river tributary north of Crestview, known as Fort Kirkland Branch.
“Now, we don’t know when it got that name if it got that name in 1837, or if it got that name much later, when somebody’s like, 'Oh, yes, Fort Kirkland was here,'" she said. “So is it a real historic place name or is it just a memory landscape situation?”
While there’s still no “X” to mark the spot, GIS mapping has helped to narrow initial search zones to wooded areas around the stream that bears the fort’s name.
“We’re hopeful that that’s going to be a good target. But we’re also looking at other options, just in case it’s just a historic sort of relic name.”
Students and staff from the Archaeology Institute will conduct initial site surveys on Friday.
