Treasure Coast History Guides

The Treasure Coast history guides cover three documented stories so far, the Navy Frogmen at Fort Pierce, the Indian River citrus district and the 1715 fleet, and the table pairs each question with its key fact and guide.

Questions about the Spanish treasure fleet's wrecks near Sebastian Inlet, the salvage era and the origin of the Treasure Coast name are answered in the Sebastian history guides, which this section does not repeat. The sections below summarize each Treasure Coast story with the agency record behind it, and the guide list on this hub links every history guide in the section.

The Urca de Lima is a Spanish merchant ship from the 1715 fleet that sank in a hurricane off Fort Pierce and became Florida's first Underwater Archaeological Preserve.

The National Park Service says the ship was one of eleven vessels in a convoy sailing from Havana to Spain with goods from Mexico and Manila, that it carried private chests of silver but no royal treasure, and that after the storm the Spanish salvaged it and burned the hull to the waterline. Rediscovered in 1928, the wreck was heavily salvaged for the next 50 years until the state stopped issuing salvage permits in the 1980s and opened it to the public. Five cement cannon replicas and an anchor now mark a 100 foot by 50 foot ballast mound, and NPS calls it the only surviving wreck of the 1715 flota (NPS Urca de Lima article).

The St. Lucie County Historical Commission asked for the wreck to become an underwater park, and the Florida Division of Historical Resources says state archaeologists mapped the hull in 1985, the preserve system began in 1987 with the Urca de Lima as its first site, and the wreck was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 (Florida Museums in the Sea, Urca de Lima). The National Register nomination places it 200 yards offshore of Jack Island Park, north of the Ft. Pierce Inlet (NRHP nomination). Official depths differ: NPS and the state's Museums in the Sea page give 10 to 15 feet, while the St. Lucie County Pepper Park page says about 20 feet (St. Lucie County Pepper Park page). NPS asks boaters to use the mooring buoy rather than anchor.

Navy training at the Fort Pierce base dates to World War II: detachments of Scouts and Raiders had begun arriving by January 1943, and demolition unit training followed on June 6, 1943.

The Army Corps of Engineers describes the Fort Pierce Naval Amphibious Training Base as stretching about 25 miles from near Vero Beach to near Jensen Beach, across North and South Hutchinson Islands, and dates the first Scouts and Raiders arrivals to January 1943 (USACE Fort Pierce base page). Naval Special Warfare Command says demolition training moved there from Solomons, Maryland, on June 6, 1943 (NSW WWII history), and the state's management plan for Fort Pierce Inlet State Park calls the park and its adjacent waters the birthplace and training grounds of the Navy Frogmen (DEP Fort Pierce Inlet State Park plan). The World War II Navy Frogmen training guide follows the base from 1943 to its 1946 closing and the Corps' search for leftover munitions.

The Indian River citrus story on the Treasure Coast rests on a statute that reserves the name for fruit grown inside a defined production area and on county-backed research that began in 1947.

Florida Statutes 601.091 lets only citrus grown within a specified production area be labeled with its name, with an exception for final court orders in cases filed before July 1, 1976 (Florida Statutes 601.091). Research came to St. Lucie County in 1947, when the Indian River Field Laboratory started work on a grove site owned by the county, the start of today's UF/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort Pierce (UF/IFAS IRREC history). The Indian River citrus district guide adds the State Archives account of the 1894 to 1895 freeze, the A.B. Michael (Wabasso) Bridge marker, the 1931 founding of the Indian River Citrus League and 2025-2026 production by county.

The Fort Pierce Inlet dates to May 8, 1921, when the final barrier cut was made by a special taxing district the Florida Legislature created in 1918.

The state's May 2022 inlet management plan says that after a small natural inlet called the Indian River Inlet closed, boating access was needed for fishing vessels and local commerce, so the Legislature established the Ft. Pierce Inlet District in 1918 as a special taxing district comprising most of St. Lucie County. Dredging of the original channel began in 1920, and the first channel was four feet deep (DEP Ft. Pierce Inlet Management Plan, 2022). The Fort Pierce Inlet State Park guide covers the later jetty extensions, the federal project and the sand bypassing that followed.

National Register records for Fort Pierce include the Old Fort Pierce City Hall at 315 Avenue A and the Fort Pierce Site on South Indian River Drive, along with the Urca de Lima offshore.

The NPGallery record for Fort Pierce City Hall, Old (National Register Information System ID 01001338) lists its address as 315 Avenue A, its significant year as 1925, its areas of significance as architecture and politics and government, and a publication date of 12/7/2001 (NPGallery record 01001338). The nomination for the Fort Pierce Site, on South Indian River Drive, states that there are no visible remains of Fort Pierce; it relies on a plan dated July 30, 1839 that shows a palmetto log blockhouse about twenty-five yards from the Indian River, joined by picket lines to company quarters and officers quarters (Fort Pierce Site NRHP nomination).

Two Florida Artists Hall of Fame entries tie to Fort Pierce: the Florida Highwaymen, inducted in 2004, and the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, inducted in 1990.

The Florida Department of State describes the Highwaymen as a small group of Black American painters from Ft. Pierce who began painting Florida landscapes in the late 1950s, recognizes 26 of them as the original Highwaymen, and says a 1995 arts journal article named them for selling paintings from their cars along I-95 and A1A (Florida Department of State, Florida Highwaymen). The same Hall of Fame says Hurston moved to Fort Pierce in 1957, gives her years as 1891 to 1960, and says she is remembered each spring at ZoraFest in Fort Pierce (Florida Department of State, Zora Neale Hurston).

Last verified: October 22, 2026, for the Treasure Coast history hub, against the NPS and NRHP Urca de Lima records, the Museums in the Sea and Pepper Park pages, the Navy and Corps of Engineers base histories, the DEP park and inlet plans, Florida Statutes 601.091, the IRREC history, two NPGallery Fort Pierce records and two Florida Artists Hall of Fame pages.