Northeast Florida Parks: A Shipwreck in the Sand and a Fort Nobody Ever Finished
Four state parks sit between Amelia Island and Ormond Beach, and in each one the interesting thing is literally buried in the ground.
Little Talbot Island State Park, Jacksonville
A nineteenth-century wooden ship is buried in this beach. It surfaced once in 1987 and again in December 2022, after Tropical Storm Ian and Hurricane Nicole stripped away enough sand to expose the hull and bow timbers. Chuck Meide of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program went out to examine it. Nobody knows what ship it is. The park covers 1,531 acres and costs five dollars per vehicle. Note that the south end is currently posted for dry shoreline access only, no swimming, because of the currents where the river meets the ocean.
Fort Clinch State Park, Fernandina Beach
Construction started in 1847, and the fort was never finished. It is one of the Third System masonry forts the country built between 1816 and 1867, named for General Duncan Lamont Clinch, and the park’s own history page says flatly that it was never fully completed. A living-history garrison fires the cannons and works the grounds the first weekend of every month. Fourteen hundred acres, six dollars per vehicle. Two caveats: the ranger station has been closed for renovation since August 27, 2026, and the fishing pier that Hurricane Matthew wrecked in 2016 is still gone, with a replacement estimated at two million dollars and possibly a decade away.
Anastasia State Park, St. Augustine
The coquina that built the Castillo de San Marcos came out of quarries inside this park. The Spanish Coquina Quarries went onto the National Register on February 23, 1972, and the stone cut here also went into most of the 36 Spanish colonial residences still standing in St. Augustine. The park runs more than 1,600 acres with 139 campsites. Eight dollars per vehicle, the highest of the four.
Tomoka State Park, Ormond Beach
The Timucuan village of Nocoroco stood on this ground, and a Spanish diplomat named Alvaro Mexia wrote it down in 1605. The mound complex beside it, ten mounds in all, may have been occupied as early as 5000 B.C., and the site joined the National Register in 1973. In 1766 the British granted Richard Oswald 20,000 acres here for the Mount Oswald plantation, worked by enslaved people growing indigo, rice, sugar, timber and oranges. It was abandoned by 1785. Five dollars per vehicle.
All four open at 8 a.m. and close at sunset, every day of the year.
