Fort King National Historic Landmark in Marion County, Florida

Photograph: Fort King monument Ocala01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Marion County attraction

Fort King National Historic Landmark

Marion County · Central Florida

The reconstructed 1827 fort on the eastern edge of Ocala where the Second Seminole War began.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The United States built it as a buffer between arriving settlers and the Seminole, who had been pushed onto a reservation to the south under the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, and named it for Colonel William King of the 4th Infantry. It sat on the military road network linking Fort Brooke at Tampa Bay with posts to the north. On December 28, 1835, the same day Major Dade's column was destroyed further south, Seminole warriors killed the Indian agent Wiley Thompson outside the gates, and the war ran for seven years from that morning. The Army abandoned the fort and it burned in July 1836; a new one stood by April 1837. Peace talks held here in May 1839 produced the Macomb agreement, which lasted two months. The building served as Marion County's first courthouse in 1844 and was then pulled down for its timber. The Daughters of the American Revolution bought the ground in 1927, it was made a National Historic Landmark in February 2004, and an accurate reconstruction opened in late 2017

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