Oranges and inlets

Nineteenth century settlers in Florida's Indian River Lagoon (IRL) region created an isolated fringe culture wholly dependent on the instable hydrological forces of the shallow lagoon system. These settlers were among the first to construct a built environment market by the dredging and filling that would define much of the twentieth century Sunshine State. There has been no period when the liminal IRL ecosystem was not without shifting barrier islands and dramatically varying salinity levels due primarily to the oceanic interchange following the opening and closing of natural inlets. This paper suggests that attempts to "restore" the lagoon will necessarily declare an arbitrary historical form to be normative for the system. The first and last chapters provide an overview of the system's origins and recent history, while the core of the paper focuses on human-environment interaction of the lagoon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.