The Real Walker's Key, a/k/a Indian Hill or Cockroach Key

The photo above shows an aerial view of Indian Hill looking north. (Source: The Tampa Tribune, 4/10/2014)

This map, from 1900, shows Indian Hill, a/k/a Cockroach Key, a/k/a Cockroach Mound, on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay.

This photograph, taken in 1900 by Clarence B. Moore or his crew (see below) shows Indian Hill and the home of my great-grandfather and his young family.  The mounds, the largest of which is about 40 feet in height, remain, but are overgrown with vegetation and offer no views.  

On the eastern shore of Tampa Bay, about three miles south of the Little Manatee River in Hillsborough County, there is a small island called Indian Hill, also known as “Big Cockroach Mound” or “Cockroach Key”. It is difficult to imagine a name less likely to attract visitors than these last two names. In my novel I call the island “Walker’s Key” because my great-grandfather Walker owned it, lived there for several years with his young family (including my grandfather), died there, and was buried there.  In addition, two Walker children were born there.

Indian Hill is near the western edge of a small bay called Cockroach Bay. It is behind some barrier islands and almost surrounded by several much smaller and much flatter mangrove islands. 

The website for Cockroach Bay Preserve State Park states: “Horseshoe crabs were once so abundant along the shores of Florida’s west coast that early Spanish explorers called them cockroaches, believing them to be seagoing cousins of insects. Many people believe that is how Cockroach Bay received its unlikely name.” 

Indian Hill is actually made up of three Indian shell mounds, or middens,  very large collections of shells discarded by the local native American residents over a thousand years or more.  A newspaper article from 1936, describing Works Progress Administration (a New Deal agency of the U.S. government) research into the Indian mounds of Hillsborough County, says about the mound at Indian Hill:

This mound is known as the kitchen midden type, built up through generations of primitive life by refuse from a great eating place, perhaps the banqueting hall of a nation; perhaps it was a ceremonial gathering place. It was also a burial ground.[i]

A 2014 news article from the Tampa Tribune reports that scientists have found portions of some 224 human skeletons, primitive tools and pottery in the mound at Indian Hill.[ii]  Indian Hill is now considered a site of significant value for its Native American history and artifacts, and in 1973 it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. In 1895, however, Indian Hill was just a tiny coastal island in the middle of nowhere, significant only because it was the highest point on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay (possibly the highest Indian Mound in Hillsborough County[iii]). It was also halfway up the bay between Egmont Key and Tampa. Somebody made the decision that it was a good location for a small light as an aid to navigation in Tampa Bay.

My great-grandfather purchased Indian Hill from the State of Florida on August 28, 1895 for the sum of ten dollars. I have the original deed. The deed estimates the land area, which was not actually surveyed, as approximately ten acres. A separate receipt dated August 28, 1895 confirms that the consideration paid was ten dollars.

A house was constructed on the island and then my great-grandfather relocated his family there. My great-grandfather’s family then consisted of his wife and three young sons. A daughter was born on Indian Hill in 1897, and a fourth son was born there in 1899.

Other than the fact that his parents were living across Tampa Bay on Egmont Key, one might wonder why my great-grandfather chose to move his family to Indian Hill, giving up everything the family knew on Cape Cod. Indian Hill was, and is, an isolated place, accessible only by boat and not near any real centers of civilization. The nearest village, Gulf City, was about three miles to the north near the mouth of the Little Manatee River, and it had a population of only 76 residents in 1895. This was in the days before radio and television, and there were no telephones anywhere nearby.

On the positive side, there was an endless supply of fish and oysters to be had at Indian Hill. Also, my great-grandfather did have some employment there. The 1900 census indicates that he was a lighthouse keeper. My great-grandfather was paid $550 per year by the U.S. Government to operate and maintain a light for the safety of mariners on Tampa Bay[iv]. 

I have been unable to find any images of the Indian Hill light.  A 1900 news article indicates that there was a lighthouse on Indian Hill.   A 2007 article in the Tampa Tribune says “Walker’s job was to maintain a shipping light on nearby Beacon Key.”[v]  Still other articles suggest, more convincingly, that the light was actually installed on pilings a short distance out in the bay.  A report of the United States Light-House Board dated November 9, 1895, indicates that six “lens-lantern” lights were installed at different locations around Tampa Bay in January, 1895, one of the locations being Indian Hill. I suspect that Indian Hill was identified here as the location even though the light was actually located out in the water in front of the island.

According to Wikipedia, “a lens lantern is a small, self-contained lamp structure which may sometimes be used to serve as a lighthouse. Unlike a regular fresnel lense, the lantern requires no housing to protect it from the weather; its glass sides would refract and magnify the light in the same fashion as would the lens. Lens lanterns were popular alternatives to lighthouses in the nineteenth century; they required less care, were cheaper to erect, and could be fairly easily placed.”

In early 1900, Clarence B. Moore, a wealthy owner of a Philadelphia paper company who had by that time become a noteworthy archaeologist and expert on Indian mounds, visited Indian Hill. He wrote:

About 3 miles down Tampa Bay from the mouth of the Little Manatee river is an island known as Indian Hill, probably eight acres in extent, almost covered by an aboriginal deposit of shells, including oyster, clam, conch (Fulgur), cockle (Cardium), Pecten, Strombas gigas, Strombus pguilis, Fasciolaria gigantean, Fasciolaria tulipa. … The largest of these heaps has a height of 30 feet above the surrounding shell deposit and 36 feet 7 inches above water level. We believe, after personal inspection of the majority of Florida shell heaps and careful inquiry as to the rest, that the shell deposit at Indian Hill exceeds in height any in the State, though considerably greater altitudes for other sites have been given by writers who base their assertions upon estimate. In Fig. 4 we give a photograph showing the great deposit at Indian Hill, extending completely across the background of the picture, with the house of the owner of the island, Mr. F.B. Walker, occupying the westernmost extremity of the heap.[vi]

In 1908, the Walkers sold Indian Hill to Lewis Symmes and L.L. Buchanan, of Tampa, for the sum of one thousand dollars.[vii] According to a newspaper article from 2007[viii], Lewis and Symmes made the purchase as part of a failed get-rich-quick scheme. They planned to sell the mounds of shells at Indian Hill as material to build roads, but the plan failed. They never came up with a workable method to remove the shell material from the island. They built a pedestrian bridge to the island that proved to be inadequate to the task and was destroyed in a storm. To make matters worse for the new owners, asphalt soon replaced shells as the material of choice for roadways in Florida.

Sometime after the Walkers sold the island, it became a destination for seekers of Native American artifacts. Boat tours from St. Petersburg brought tourists across the bay to visit the shell mounds there and to see the view of St. Petersburg from across the water.  

In February, 1926, my grandfather returned to Indian Hill. My grandmother accompanied him. My grandmother wrote a letter to her mother-in-law, my great-grandfather’s widow, on February 8, 1926. The letter, which my grandmother gave to me, describes the visits they made to Egmont Key and Indian Hill. 

My grandmother wrote that at Indian Hill she and my grandfather met a man named Boone who, for the prior five years, had been living in the house in which the Walkers had lived. They were invited into the house, and my grandfather was very happy to find things “so much as he remembered them”. 

Soon some fishermen came in and we watched them net sheeps head and mullet in front of the house. We ate our lunch with Mr. Boone and Capt. Carpenter on the wharf from the house and then we went over and watched the fishermen prepare theirs by the fishing shack on the small island. They made biscuit and fried fish out doors around a small fire and then made coffee. It was fun to see them. Your son said it was just the way they used to do.

Mr. Boone told them that many people, including Henry Ford, had visited Indian Hill to see the Indian relics. The mound, my grandmother wrote, “has been dug down quite a little”.

In 2014, Hillsborough County purchased Indian Hill from the Symmes family for $100,000, ten thousand times the amount my great-grandfather paid the State of Florida for it in 1895. The island is now part of the 600-acre Cockroach Bay Preserve State Park, which, together with the 5,000 acres of the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve which surrounds the islands, offers unlimited opportunities for fishing and exploration by canoe or kayak. 

There is now very little physical evidence that the Walkers’ house ever stood on Indian Hill.  Bricks from the foundation can be found there, but not much else.  The island is now well covered in vegetation which, unfortunately, blocks all views.  I visited the island in April, 2022, and was able to explore the mounds, but even from the highest mound the ocean is no longer visible.

[i] Newspaper article mailed to my grandfather in April, 1936, from Carl W. Bahrt, of Tampa Florida entitled Bones From Mounds Near Here Indicate Massacre of Kids. Newspaper and date of publication not indicated. Carl W. Bahrt (“Willie”) had been a cabin boy at Egmont Key for my great-great-grandfather Walker, according to the notation by my grandmother on a photograph of Carl and his wife. Actually he worked for all of the pilots on Egmont Key as a child, and then from 1907 to 1937 he was himself a pilot. 

[ii] Hammett, Yvette C. (2014, April 10). Hillsborough adds Island Gem in Land Buy. The Tampa Tribune. Retrieved 6/15/14 from http://tbo.com/news/breaking-news/hillsborough-county-buys-big-cockroach-mound-20140410/

[iii] Hammett, supra.

[iv] Hurley, Neil E. (1990) Keepers of Florida Lighthouses 1820 – 1939, Third Edition. Historic Lighthouse Publishers. 

[v] Helgeson, Baird (2007, September 16). Brush Shrouds Burial Mounds. The Tampa Tribune. Retrieved 2/6/17 from http://www.tbo.com/ap/offbeat/brush-shrouds-burial-mounds-187277

[vi] Moore, Clarence B. (1900) Certain Antiquities of the Florida West-Coast. Reprint from the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Volume XI. Philadelphia: P.C. Stockhausen.

[vii] Affidavit dated September 26, 1908, Hillsborough County Deeds Book 90, page 551.

[viii] Helgeson, supra.  

This is the home of my great-grandparents, Frederick Walker and Clarissa (Nickerson) Walker on Indian Hill.  I believe it was built in 1895.  This photo is probably from 1900.  The structure behind the house appears to be a large cistern.  Three of the five Walker children are shown here with their parents.  The two youngest children were born on Indian Hill, Mirella in 1897 and Albert in 1899.  Though I'm not absolutely sure, I believe my grandfather, Fred, is the one on the left, followed by his brother, Henry, his sister, Mirella, mother, Clarissa, and father, Fred.  I suspect that the oldest brother, Ben, may have been living on Egmont Key with Captain and Mrs. Walker.  The youngest child, Albert, was probably only 8 months old and in his crib inside.  The house was still standing in 1926 when my grandparents went for a visit and found that it was occupied by a Mr. Boone, but now it is long gone.

Taken probably in 1900, this photo shows a "fishing camp" on a barrier island just in front of Walker's Key.  My grandfather is seated in the middle of the image.  His father is standing to the right, and behind his father is little brother Henry.

My grandfather, Frederick B. Walker, standing on top of Indian Hill (a/k/a Cockroach Key) in February, 1926, when he returned for a visit to the place he lived between 1895 and 1900.  As of now (2022), the island is so overgrown with vegetation that there are no views from anywhere on the island, though one can still explore the mounds.