[3] On October 21, 1837, the Seminole leader Osceola was captured about a mile south of this site by Gen. Joseph Marion Hernández under a white flag of truce, on Gen. Thomas Jesup's orders.

Major Ashby obeyed his orders, and with the aid of Hernández, took the seventy-five armed Indian warriors, including Osceola, prisoner without a gun fired.

This treacherous action was a flagrant violation of the laws of warfare, resulting in Jesup being denounced in the press and roundly condemned by public opinion.

[12] The historian Charles H. Coe mentions in his 1898 book, Red Patriots: The Story of the Seminoles, that a St. Augustine native named John H. Masters, a sergeant in the squadron that captured the Seminole leader, many years later guided members of the St. Augustine Historical Society to the spot where the capture took place;[13] a coquina marker with a plaque on it was placed there in 1916.

It consisted of four log houses built in a hallow square; two occupied by the troops and one by officers, and the fourth used as a hospital and commissary.

There were many fortifications built near vital road and waterway routes in the St. Augustine area and to its south to protect the large plantations against Seminole Indian attacks.

These fortifications were typically simple defensive structures and were used as supply depots, transportation and communication links, shipping points, field hospitals and housing for regular U.S. Army troops and militiamen.