Wakulla Volcano
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wakulla Volcano was a mystery in Wakulla County, Florida, in which a column of smoke, sometimes accompanied by bright light, was seen coming from deep in Wakulla's swamps. Sightings occurred as far away as Tallahassee and the Gulf of Mexico, and were reported throughout much of the 19th century, but the phenomenon may have been visible much earlier; it has even been suggested that Wakulla, which may mean "mist" or "misting", received its name from the strange smoke. A number of explanations have been given, most famously that an active volcano stood out in the swamplands, but no one was able to locate the smoke's source before it disappeared forever on August 31, 1886, the day of the Charleston earthquake. Modern geologists are quite certain no volcano could exist in Florida.
The first accounts of the smoke come from Seminoles living nearby, and by the 1830s, white settlers attributed the sight to campfires from white or Indian settlements, pirates, renegades, or a volcano. Over the years a number of folkloric explanations were given, along with plausibly naturalistic ones such as deep-burning peat fires, and several teams of investigators set out to solve the mystery during the late 1800s (The Smithsonian Institution holds correspondence from A. W. Barber between 1890–1894 concerning his experience there). The smoke was seen for the last time before Charleston, South Carolina and the surrounding area was struck by the earthquake of 1886, but a number of people have claimed to have found the crater of origin since that time.
