Clarks Summit native makes career-defining underwater discovery at Dry Tortugas

May 12—As she swam in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a research team at Dry Tortugas National Park, Clarks Summit native Devon Fogarty spotted something underwater that made her pause.

It didn't appear to be natural.

It was August and Fogarty, then a graduate student pursuing her master's in underwater archaeology at the University of Miami, had been invited to participate in a project to audit submerged assets at Dry Tortugas, a remote National Park Service outpost 70 miles west of Key West, Florida.

"We were just finishing up and weren't expecting to find anything that important," Fogarty said in a telephone interview. "I saw this parallel line of seaweed. It was growing east to west and the pattern just didn't look random like the rest of seaweed along the reef, so I swam over it."

Park service maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano, swimming about 10 meters away, followed and recognized immediately what Fogarty had found.

"I said, 'That's a gravestone,'" he said.

In what is considered a major archaeological find, the park service recently announced the discovery of the remains of a 19th century quarantine hospital and a cemetery on a submerged island near Garden Key, the second largest island in the Dry Tortugas and home to Fort Jefferson.

While only one grave has been identified — marked by the stone Fogarty discovered — historical records indicate dozens of people, mostly U.S. soldiers, may have been buried there, the park service said.

The small hospital was used to treat yellow fever patients at Fort Jefferson between 1890 and 1900. The long-lost cemetery has been identified as the Fort Jefferson Post Cemetery.

For Fogarty, 33, it was easily the most significant field work she has ever done.

"So far," she said. "I'm hoping it's all uphill from here."

Marano said all the pieces just came together on the project, which is rare.

"I would say this is pretty career-defining, especially for Devon and especially for as young as she is in her career, because it's pretty defining for mine as well," he said.

Fogarty acknowledged underwater archaeology is a somewhat unusual field for someone from Clarks Summit.

A 2008 graduate of Holy Cross High School in Dunmore, Fogarty received her bachelor's degree from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, and then pursued another passion — scuba diving. She later joined the Coast Guard and earned a master's degree in tropical medicine and public health from Tulane University.

In 2020, she enrolled in the underwater archaeology program at the University of Miami.

"Essentially what I wanted to do was stay as close as possible to the water," she said. "I had been diving all throughout the Coast Guard. That was a recreational activity that I loved, and I really did love history and the history of medicine."

Because of her background in public health and tropical medicine, her University of Miami advisor put her in touch with Marano, maritime archaeologist for the south Florida national parks and an adjunct lecturer at the school. They discussed a project he was working on about quarantine hospitals on the islands around Fort Jefferson, and he suggested they work together on it.

"He mentioned there were a lot of hospital and quarantine initiatives in the Dry Tortugas specifically to avoid yellow fever and dengue outbreaks either in Key West or Mobile or New Orleans, those sort of very populated port cities in the 1800s," she said.

She started doing background research, trying to learn everything she could about the history of quarantining at Dry Tortugas.

Fogarty said the main purpose of the survey in August, carried out by the park staff along with members of the park service's Submerged Resources Center and the Southeast Archeological Center, was to relocate previously identified underwater assets and assess their conditions.

However, Marano set aside two days to search in an area where he believed the remains of the quarantine hospital would be found after spotting the site from the air several years ago.

Conducting a systematic survey of the area, the team located submerged pilings and other items, mostly bits of ceramic and brick, where Marano expected to find them.

The gravestone was a surprise, and its discovery raised more questions.

Fogarty said the marker clearly had a name in Gothic lettering with a death date under it.

She returned the following day to document the discovery and, after scrubbing away seaweed and other debris, was able to get a proper photo of the name "John Greer" inscribed on the stone with the date Nov. 5, 1861, beneath it.

"That was pretty exciting, but we didn't have any context for it," Fogarty said.

In an attempt to learn who Greer was, she started first with the Dry Tortugas collection in Key West, where she pored over old medical documents without finding his name.

At the National Archives in Washington, D.C., she went through the monthly letters of the head engineering officer at Fort Jefferson. Again, no mention of Greer. A review of the overseer's log produced the same negative result.

She finally found Greer's name in an accounts record-keeping book and learned he had been working at Fort Jefferson as a laborer, specifically building scaffolding.

Researchers now know he worked as a civilian contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers, although it is still unclear how he died, whether from disease, an accident or another cause, Fogarty said.

"There were workplace hazards all over when building Fort Jefferson," she said. "It was incredibly difficult work."

Marano said one of the reasons the find is so significant is that it helps to highlight a history of Fort Jefferson and Dry Tortugas that has not been well-documented or well-told.

Most Americans, if they know about Fort Jefferson at all, know that it was used as a prison and its most famous prisoner was Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

But Marano said there are other stories still to be told about the islands and surrounding waters and the military personnel, enslaved people, women, children and civilian laborers who had a part in them.

"That's kind of where this find helps us open that door," he said.

He said he would like to do a more intensive survey of the submerged island to potentially identify other graves or other structures that were located there, as well as more historic research so the park service can effectively tell the story of the people interred in the cemetery.

He anticipates Fogarty will be part of that.

"If they have room for me, I'll make time for it," she said.

Fogarty, who now lives in Daytona, Florida, wrapped up her master's at the University at Miami in December and is pursuing her doctorate in applied anthropology with a focus in underwater archaeology at the University of South Florida.

She would ultimately like to work with the park service or a private submerged cultural resources organization doing survey work in the Caribbean, focusing on sites of people who have been marginalized by history and telling their stories.

She said it was a "good day" when she was able connect the history of John Greer's experience to the grave marker in Dry Tortugas.

"I want to record as much of those common experiences as I'm able to in my life," she said.

Contact the writer: dsingleton@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9132.