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Tocoi Creek

Florida river stubsRivers of St. Johns County, FloridaTributaries of the St. Johns River

Tocoi Creek is a tributary of the St. Johns River in St. Johns County, Florida. Kayakers report seeing abundant wildlife including turtles, alligators, and osprey and what is left of an old steamship dock as they paddle the creek. The creek is named after a Timucuan word that means water lily. The indigenous Timucua lived in the area prior to European contact in the 1500s through about 1800.Its southern bank was once the home to the settlement of Tocoi. The area was a transportation hub in the late 1800s, but it is now considered a ghost town. In 1872, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who spent winters in nearby Jacksonville from 1867 to 1884, reportedly called the landing at Tocoi Creek "a shed and a sand-bank and a little shanty, where to those who require, refreshments are served."The St. Johns County school board voted to name its newest high school, Tocoi Creek High School, after the creek in December 2020. The school will open in 2021.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Tocoi Creek (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 29.861111111111 ° E -81.552777777778 °
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CR 13

Florida, United States
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Fort San Francisco de Pupo
Fort San Francisco de Pupo

Fort San Francisco de Pupo (Spanish: Fuerte San Francisco de Pupo) was an 18th-century Spanish fort on the west bank of the St. Johns River in Florida, about eighteen miles from St. Augustine (San Agustín), the capital of Spanish Florida (La Florida). Lying on the old trail to the Spanish province of Apalachee in western Florida, Fort Pupo and its sister outpost, Fort Picolata on the opposite shore of the river, controlled all traffic on the ferry crossing. The remains of Fort Pupo are situated about three miles south of Green Cove Springs in Clay County, near the end of Bayard Point opposite Picolata. The surrounding area is a hammock of southern live oak, southern magnolia, pignut hickory and other typical trees native to the region.The site of Fort Pupo was excavated in stratigraphic tests by cultural anthropologist John Goggin and students of the University of Florida in 1950 and 1951; his team's excavations indicated that the original structure of Fort Pupo was little more than a sentry box. A letter written by Royal Engineer Antonio de Arredondo on January 22, 1737 describes it as "a sentry box built of boards, eight feet in diameter… surrounded by a palisade." This diminutive fortification was replaced in 1738 by the construction of a new wooden blockhouse, barracks, and storehouses on the orders of the governor of La Florida, Manuel de Montiano. The work was done under the direction of Engineer Pedro Ruiz de Olano, who pulled a crew of carpenters, sawyers, and axemen from construction of the Castillo de San Marcos, the fortress of St. Augustine, to rebuild the Pupo blockhouse. The architectural plan and profile of the structure are shown in his "Plano y perfil del nuevo fortín de San Francisco de Pupo" (Plan and Profile of Fort San Francisco de Pupo).