Thanks to community efforts and the Ormond Beach Historical Society in the 1980s, the Ormond Indian Mound, at the corner of South Beach Street and Mound Avenue, has been preserved as one of the finest and most intact Indian burial mounds in eastern Florida.
Salvage excavations indicate that more than one hundred individual burials remain in the mound. The Timucua Indians, whose tribes stretched from northeastern Florida to Southeastern Georgia, began this mound in the late St. Johns Period, after A.D. 800.
Associated with the Ormond Mound was a charnel house used to store bodies before burial. The Timucua used such structures to prepare corpses (mostly of prominent people) for the afterlife. The dead were laid out on wooden racks and allowed to decompose, attended usually by high priests. After the bodies dried away, each set of bones was then bundled individually and interred with special ceremony. This method explains the great number of skeletons found in burial mounds.
The Timucua Indians were over 200,000 strong in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia when the French and Spanish came to Florida in the early 1500s. With constant warfare among the rival chiefs and other Indian tribes, plus the lack of immunity to diseases brought by Europeans, the Timucua tribes rapidly diminished. As the Spaniards gave Florida to the English in the early 1760s, they took several of the Timucua to Cuba with them. But the Timucua were essentially extinct by the early 1800s. It is believed that remaining Timucuas may have joined with the Seminoles.
The MacDonald House
Home of the Ormond Beach Historical Society
and the Ormond Beach Welcome Center
38 E. Granada Blvd.
Ormond Beach, FL 32176
Tuesday - Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Phone (386) 677-7005