1953 Map of Fellsmere NW

About this map

St Johns Marsh dominates the southern landscape of this 1950s Brevard County quadrangle, showing a complex network of reclaimed wetlands and engineering. The map reveals an intensive effort to manage the water table through a geometric grid of structures labeled Levee and Spoil Bank, which partition the low-lying terrain into functional tracts. Several scattered water sources, designated as Flowing Wells and Flowing Well, suggest the importance of groundwater access for agriculture or cattle operations in this section of the Florida wilderness during the mid-century. The transition from natural marshland to an engineered environment is starkly visible in the northern half of the sheet, where survey lines and man-made embankments overwrite the once-undifferentiated wetlands.