Fort Drum, Florida

Fort Drum was a town in Okeechobee County, Florida, United States, located on US 441, between Yeehaw Junction and Okeechobee. A service plaza on Florida's Turnpike is named after the town. The Fort Drum Wildlife Management Area consists of nearly 21,000 acres in southwestern Indian River County and is named for its proximity to the town and is known as the birthplace of the St. John's River. Fort Drum is the only known locale for crystal bearing fossil shells. There is a cemetery in the middle of the town on almost eight acres, in which many of the first settlers of Fort Drum were buried and still remain. It is currently owned and maintained by Okeechobee County.GeographyFort Drum is located at.In the Pliocene and Pleistocene it was underlain by the now-smaller Lake Okeechobee. Vast limestone deposits containing the remains of large bivalve molluscs developed calcite crystallization while still under water. The gemlike crystals were discovered after the hard limestone deposits came to be excavated for aggregate. In 2008 the quarry known as Ruck's Pit was closed and allowed to flood.HistoryAfter the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842, the US Army built a network of forts across the central part of the state, with military roads that connected them. Of those roads, one was roughly east-west from Fort Bassinger to Fort Vinton, north of present-day Vero Beach. The other ran approximately north-south from Fort Kissimmee to Fort Jupiter, and came to be known as the 'old wire road'.