Velda Mound Park

Velda Mound was built around 1450 by the Fort Walton culture and used by their descendants, the Apalachee, until about 1625 — a platform mound that once elevated a residence or council house beside an open plaza used for stickball games and the Green Corn ceremony. Archaeologists documented the site during I-10's construction in the early 1970s; the mound was damaged decades earlier by looters digging for artifacts during the site's years as dairy pastureland, before the state began preserving it as a park in 1984. The original submission for this entry described visions of people warming themselves by a fire and a glowing white wolf heard howling at night — no documented account or named witness backs either claim, preserved here as reported rather than as verified history.