Looking For Angola: From Bradenton To Red Bays, Bahamas BRADENTON (WUSF) - In the front yard of a modest concrete block home, archeologist Bill Burger digs a small test hole a meter deep screening each shovel-full of dirt as he works.

BURGER: It does not look like we have so much fill in this spot here. It looks like natural soil. It's got some contamination.

Burger is excavating for physical evidence of a settlement somewhat older than this Bradenton neighborhood.

BURGER: At least as early as 1812, this place was called Angola. There was some settlement here by Cuban fishermen who had regular traffic with Cuba.

The fishermen's ranchero was located near Angola - which historians say was a thriving black community of free and fugitive slaves. But, little is known about Angola - even its exact location is a mystery. Burger says common sense puts it close to the Braden-Castle community.

BURGER: Having this nice, high ground right next to a flowing spring would have made it an optimal place to live.

Burger joined other archeologists, anthropologists and historians - all are on a quest to find the forgotten settlement of Angola. Ideally, he would like to unearth pottery or tools with an African link or trade items that date to the early 1800s. He sifts another shovel full of white sand.

BURGER: Here's a piece of a bottle now that's a little more interesting. This could be 1840s doesn't have a makers mark on it. This is a bottom of a liquor or wine bottle.

For the next five months, Burger will systematically dig test holes - where property owners have granted permission - throughout a three-mile-square area.

BURGER: There's a lot of work to be done to try to find physical evidence of Angola.

There is other evidence though. Florida A & M University historian Canter Brown collected accounts from newspapers, military records and diaries. He says Angola was established by blacks after the Patriot War - then came the First Seminole War.

BROWN: And that's where 400 black warriors in April 1818 stood off Andrew Jackson's entire army for a day to permit their family - their loved ones - to escape across the Suwannee River and flee into the peninsula for safety. I think most if not all of the refugees of that fighting made their way to Angola as well at least for a time.

For centuries Spanish Florida was known as a haven for escaped slaves. Blacks fought along side the Seminoles fending off intruders. Brown believes Angola - at its height - may have been one of the largest black settlements in Florida with as many as 700 residents.

BROWN: The Angola story did have a tragic ending. Many of the residents of Angola had been warriors who had fought against Andrew Jackson's army.

Then, Andrew Jackson was named Florida's provisional governor when the U.S. took control of Spanish Florida in 1821.

BROWN: In the very first communication he writes back to Washington asks permission to go into the peninsula to get the blacks. And even though he doesn't name Angola in that letter, clearly he is aiming at them.

Jackson's request was denied. But, Brown says Jackson's allies took a raiding party into Florida. And in the spring of 1821, they looted and burned Angola capturing about 250 men, women and children to be sold back into slavery. Yet, hundreds escaped - some to interior Polk County - many more down the coast.

OLDHAM: I'm not focusing on the raid. Yes it was bad. Yes I feel sad about it but look what happened after the raid. Some people were able to survive. That's the story I want to tell - the survivor story.

Vickie Oldham - a Sarasota documentary producer - put together the Looking for Angola project. Oldham won state grants to fund the archeological dig and to hold community forums.

OLDHAM: The fact that the story did not end there is what gets me too. Many died but some folks got on rafts somehow made their way to the Bahamas.

HOWARD: Those people leaving in 1821 for the Bahamas and my people arriving in 1821 in Red Bays - there is a connection. At least some of the people who were in Angola must have been some of the people who eventually arrived and established the community of Red Bays.

Dr. Rosalyn Howard is an anthropologist at the University of Central Florida. She lived on Andros Island for a year gathering oral histories from the Red Bays residents about their Florida ancestors.

BENJAMIN LEWIS: I'm a descendent of the Seminole. My great grandfather was Samuel Lewis. He came from Florida in a canoe.

There's no direct link - yet - between the Red Bays inhabitants and the long lost residents of Angola. But, scholars have only begun looking for Angola. It's a journey that will wind from the banks of the Manatee River through the archives of Cuba, the Bahamas, England and beyond. © Copyright 2010, WUSF