Our first stop in Fort Pierce was the St. Lucie County Regional History Center. I found out about this place when I looked up things to do in the St. Lucie area and since I love history, it sounded like a fun place to visit.
The drive to Fort Pierce took us along Indian River Road, past splendid river front houses. Mom, Aunt Suzie, Jill, and I each picked out which one was our dream house. St. Lucie County Regional Historic Center is in the Hutchinson Island part of Fort Pierce. It's exhibits cover the history of the Indian River region from the Ais people who lived her for thousands of years before the Spanish supposedly "discovered" it, to the early Spanish settlers and the famous golden galleons, to the Seminole people and the pioneers and their conflicts over land, to the industries such as cattle, fruit, and tourism which have made the area what it is today.
This part of Florida is known as the treasure coast because of the golden galleons, Spanish ships which sunk near here in the early 18th Century. They were laden with treasure from Cuba destined for Spain but only a few of them reached their destination. The rest were unearthed by divers in the 1970s.
Fort Pierce was established in 1838 as a military outpost and is named after Benjamin Kendrick Pierce, a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army and a colonel in the Florida militia, as well as the brother of President Franklin Pierce. This was during the Second Seminole War, a conflict with the Seminole tribes over territory in Florida.
Around the turn of the century, one of the region's biggest industries was fruit, namely citrus fruits such as oranges. For a while they tried to grow pineapples. The backbreaking work of growing and harvesting the fruit was done by newly freed blacks and Irish immigrants- according to my mom, one of our ancestors was an Irish immigrant who worked for awhile as a orange picker in Florida.
The turn of the century was when industry and civilization started to arrive in Florida.
After looking in the museum, we were shown a historical house done up as it would have looked during this time period. The tour guide told me it was a middle class house but I imagine that for the time and place, it would have been considered fairly luxurious since it featured such, then, cutting edge amenities as a victrola and an ice box.
We ate lunch at the Hurricane House before moving on to the Fort Pierce marina for our 1:30 boat tour.
A pontoon boat took us around the lagoons and inlets of the Indian River in search of manatees and dolphins.
We did not see any manatees but a few dolphins popped up to say hello to us.
On our way home, we did another stop at Beall's because Aunt Suzie found some coupons and then went to a store called the Shell Bizarre, where I bought a couple of sea shells. Mom insisted on looking in a Good Will which and thankfully did not waste too much time and we picked up food for dinner at a grocery story Publix.
After dinner, we went for a swim in the pool from 6:00 until it closed at 8:00.