Fort Foster: Sailors Fighting Indians in the Florida Flatwoods
Near Lakeland, Florida
Fort Foster is one of the stranger chapters in Florida military history, and it features one of the stranger casts: United States Navy sailors, operating deep inland, fighting Seminole warriors in the Florida flatwoods while defending a wooden bridge.
The Second Seminole War forced the Army to secure supply lines across difficult terrain, and the Hillsborough River was a critical chokepoint. A crossing here meant access to Fort King to the north. In March of eighteen thirty-six, Colonel William Lindsay built an initial post called Fort Alabama at this site, but a large Seminole force attacked almost immediately and the Army abandoned it in April. By December of eighteen thirty-six, a fresh force of four hundred thirty soldiers marched south from Tampa to rebuild, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William S. Foster, for whom the rebuilt post was named.
What made Fort Foster peculiar was its garrison. From January through the summer of eighteen thirty-seven, the post was defended primarily by United States Navy sailors, nearly fifty of them under the command of Navy Lieutenant Thomas Lieb, supported by about twenty artillery soldiers. The worst attack came in February of eighteen thirty-seven when a Seminole raiding party attempted to burn the bridge. The sailors and artillerists repelled the attack with musket and cannon fire.
The Army maintained Fort Foster on and off from December eighteen thirty-six through the summer of eighteen thirty-eight, as the war in central Florida ground through its most intense phase. After the post was abandoned it fell into ruin, and the Florida jungle reclaimed the site.
The state rebuilt a replica of the fort in nineteen eighty, and it now operates as Fort Foster State Historic Site within Hillsborough River State Park. The reconstructed log walls and bridge stand at the same spot where sailors once fired cannons at warriors trying to set the crossing alight.
