Twenty volunteers entered the shuttered Fort Foster at Hillsboro River State Park May 6. They ripped out rotten planks from a boardwalk encompassing the inside of the palisade walls confines. This brings the replica post one step closer to re-opening when state officials re-certify it is safe to the public to do so.

In this episode, Louie Bears Heart, a living historian portraying a Seminole of the period, witnessed the operation and joins with his observations and assessment. But first, some background on the fort.

Fort Foster Historic Site is part of the Hillsborough River State Park (HRSP), located 9 miles south of Zephyrhills, Florida, on U.S. 301 across from the park. The fort is a reproduction of a fort originally built on the same grounds in 1836 by Col. William S. Foster and his 430 men. It is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Fort Foster was utilized during the Second Seminole War to defend the bridge crossing at the Hillsborough River and served as a resupply point for the soldiers in the field. The fort was garrisoned on and off from December 1836 through April 1838

In recent years, park staff and re-enactors provided living history demonstrations of life at Fort Foster. Each year the site has presented living history events: Fort Foster Rendezvous in January and the Candlelight Dinner experience at Fort Foster during the winter months. The park staff has also conducted weekly tours of the park, allowing visitors the opportunity of touring the fort and grounds.

The HRSP Preservation Society set up a site for citizen donations to cover restructuring costs. https://www.gofundme.com/f/restoration-of-fort-foster Hillsborough River State Park Preservation Society Inc. is a volunteer citizen support organization founded in 1993 to support the needs of Hillsborough River State Park and Fort Foster Historic Site. For more information on them and to contact, go to http://www.historyandnature.org/ and contact@historyandnature.org

Hillsborough River State Park’s Fort Foster Rendezvous is a living history reenactment featuring military, Seminole, and civilian re-enactors, sutlers, traders, and craft demonstrations of the time during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) in Florida.

Host Patrick Swan is a board member with the Seminole Wars Foundation. This podcast is recorded at the homestead of the Seminole Wars Foundation in Bushnell, Fla.

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In our last episode, we reviewed how three years of the Seminole Wars Authority podcast have told the story of Seminole resistance to U.S. Government removal efforts. In this episode, we place the podcast in the context of the Foundation’s Frank Laumer Library for Seminole Wars Studies, the Laumer Library for short. We will discuss the themes presented – Black Seminoles, Crackers, Soldiers, Seminoles – among the collection’s two thousand five hundred titles. We also investigate opportunities for scholars and students scouring these shelves and among the several filing cabinets of Frank Laumer’s primary-source research materials.

Seminole Wars Foundation President, Steve Rinck, once again takes hosting duties to interview Patrick Swan, caretaker for the Laumer Library as well as our regular host.

This podcast is recorded at the homestead of the Seminole Wars Foundation in Bushnell, Fla.

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The Seminole Wars Foundation houses 2,500 titles in book, magazine, and journal form, plus thousands of digital images and scans of key Seminole Wars documents and living history event activities.

Researchers can conduct high resolution scans of 1800s art and illustrations (above) pulled from the library shelves or the filing cabinets (below) at the Center.

Awaiting patrons are roughly 300 novels, from the 1830s to the present, all related in some way to the Seminole, Crackers, and Seminole Wars. This fiction ranges from wholesome to pulp and everything in between.

One can see a selection of themes on the shelves, from Black Seminoles to War, to Firearms, to Osceola, again and everything in between.

The Seminole Wars Foundation has a book store with popular Seminole Wars titles (above) and features a host of Seminole Wars-related cultural ephemera to view (below).

This episode marks an anniversary for the podcast: Three full years’ worth of the Seminole Wars Authority.

We have done as we said we would do when we set out on this long march. We canvassed far and wide for authorities in possession of the knowledge about the Seminole Wars. Some are historians, John Missall and Jesse Marshall and Chris Kimball. Some are professors, Dr. Jim Cusick and Dr. Joe Knetsch, among many others. Some are artists, such as Johnny Montgomery and Jackson Walker. Some are just self-described regular guys with an interest in living history presentations of this conflict, fellows such as citizen-scholar Jeff Snively and truck driver and surveyor Jerry Morris. Oh yes, we’ve also interviewed a long list of re-enactors – never call it cosplay, if you value your life. All have something interesting to say and meaningful to contribute to the conversation. Chris Kimball, whom along with Jesse Marshall knows everything, understands everything, and recalls everything about the Seminole Wars tells me he always learns something new and useful from listening to a Seminole Wars podcast. That’s a gold medal to my chest.

Steve Rinck, Seminole Wars Foundation president, helms this episode with longtime host Patrick Swan.

This podcast is recorded at the homestead of the Seminole Wars Foundation in Bushnell, Fla.

Subscribe automatically to the Seminole Wars Authority through your favorite podcast catcher and "like" us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Above, Andrew Foster icon image used for first two years on the Seminole Wars podbean splash page. Podcast Mission Control.