Ormond Burial Ground

On Mound Avenue near the intersection with Beach Street.

Thanks to community efforts in the 1980s, the Ormond Mound has been preserved as one of the finest and most intact burial mounds in eastern Florida. Salvage excavations indicate that more than one hundred individual burials remain, most dating from the late-St. Johns period, after A.D. 800.

Associated with the Ormond Mound was a charnel house used to store bodies before burial. The St. Johns people used such structures to prepare corpses (mostly of prominent people) for the afterlife. The dead were laid out on wooden racks and allowed to decompose, with attendants--usually high priests--carefully removing flesh from the bones.

After the bodies dried away, each charnel house priest ended up with sets of cleaned, separated bones that were then bundled individually and interred with special ceremony. This method explains the great number of skeletons found in burial mounds.

Directions:
In the city of Ormond Beach, take S.R..40 (Granada Boulevard) to Beach Street; travel south five blocks to Mound Avenue. The city park charges no admission fee.