Wesley Chapel Gulf — Public Lands Institute

Mississippian341-334 Mya

~341 to 334 Mya Middle Mississippian Blue River Group, mostly micritic, skeletal, and oolitic limestone of the Mitchell Plateau karst belt; the gulf is an 8.3-acre collapse sink where the rock roof over an underground channel of the Lost River fell in, leaving a box canyon with bedrock walls 30 to 100 feet high.

Epoch

Middle Mississippian (Blue River Group)

Native lands Glossary →

Myaamia (Miami) · Shawnee (Shawanwaki) · Lenape (Delaware) · Kickapoo (Kiikaapoi) · Piankeshaw · Kaskaskia; the gulf lies inside the Vincennes Tract, which the Treaty of Greene Ville (August 3 1795) recognized as a United States possession around the French post on the Wabash, and whose bounds were fixed by the Treaty of Fort Wayne, June 7 1803, signed by the Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Miami, Eel River, Wea, Kickapoo, Piankeshaw, and Kaskaskia.

Displacement & Tenure

Cession 26 (Treaty of Greene Ville): the Vincennes Tract, claimed by the United States as successor to the French and British title at Vincennes, recognized at Greene Ville in 1795, and surveyed under the 1803 Fort Wayne treaty. The land around the gulf was farmed after Euro-American settlement and the gulf served nearby households as a water source, known in turn as Shirley Gulf and Elrod Gulf before taking the name of the nearby Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church. The National Park Service designated it a National Natural Landmark in 1972 while it was private land; the Forest Service established the 189-acre Wesley Chapel Gulf Purchase Unit on September 26 1996 and bought the property that year.

Shadow History

Orange County, which holds the gulf, worked to expel its Black residents. In June 1902 the New York Times reported notices decorated with skull and crossbones and signed White Cap, tacked to trees and posted around the grounds of the French Lick and West Baden Springs hotels, seven miles down the Lost River valley from the gulf, ordering Black residents to leave; the Indianapolis Freeman reported the warnings the same week. The county's census count of Black residents had already fallen from 159 in 1870 to 70 in 1890, and the hotels that depended on Black labor kept a separate hotel, the Waddy, for Black workers. The county's one Black pioneer community, the Lick Creek settlement south of Chambersburg, founded before the 1820s by free Black families from the South with help from Quaker neighbors and home to over 90 percent of the county's Black residents by 1850, is now marked only by the Roberts and Thomas family cemetery; its land has been Hoosier National Forest since 1935.

Ecology

A tree canopy shades the steep slopes around the gulf floor and the Boiling Spring pool, with long grass and wet, muddy ground on the approach; a 103-acre opening on the southern half of the special area is kept in grassland for Henslow's sparrow.

Hydrology

Lost River, 87 miles long with at least 23 miles underground, sinks at the Stein, Turner, and Tolliver swallowholes east of Orleans and surfaces here at the Boiling Spring, a rise pool at the foot of a limestone wall, before sinking again; in heavy rain the gulf floor floods up to five feet deep and 4,000 to 5,000 cubic feet per second boil up from the underground course. Downstream the river resurfaces and flows past West Baden Springs and French Lick to the East Fork of the White River.

Acreage

188

GPS

38.6230° N, 86.5222° W

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