The Tequesta mound leveled for Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel, and Black laborers ordered to bury the bones in secret (mouth of the Miami River, 1896)

SUMMARYThe Tequesta mound leveled for Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel, and Black laborers ordered to bury the bones in secret (mouth of the Miami River, 1896) [Connections: Miami & Lake Okeechobee, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDA large mound at the river mouth was removed for the hotel veranda; 50 to 60 skulls were found and "tossed into barrels and sinkholes," some given away as souvenirs; crews also removed traces of a Spanish mission and an earlier slave plantation on the site (Wikipedia, Royal Palm Hotel). Flagler's foreman John Sewell "gave away some of the skulls as souvenirs" and "ordered African-American laborers to move the remaining bones and bury them in a hole" (Wikipedia, John Sewell). Sewell's own memoir, quoted by HiddenHistoryMiami, gives the mound as "about one hundred feet long by seventy-five feet wide," says he "altogether... took out between fifty and sixty skulls," and says four trusted workers hauled the remains to a pit about twelve feet deep and were told to keep it secret; he arrived in 1896 with twelve Black laborers. Robert Carr's later Met 3 dig found human remains scattered as fill in the hotel's seawall. Hostile witness: Sewell wrote as the man who did the leveling

PATTERNThe founding of the white resort city literally put Black hands on Tequesta bones, and the official record is the destroyer's memoir

LENS (WW9)The first job they gave the Black men in Miami was to hide the Aboriginal dead

OPENThe names of the twelve laborers and the four burial workers; where the 12-ft pit is; Sewell, Memoirs and History of Miami, Florida (1933), pages

SOURCERoyal Palm Hotel (Miami) (Wikipedia)); John Sewell (Wikipedia)); The Miami River Mound (HiddenHistoryMiami); primary: John Sewell, memoir (privately printed, 1930s).