Searching for buried treasure: A family tradition

Obsession over buried treasure may be an inherited family trait for Billy Scrantom of Cherokee County. More than 70 years ago, his grandfather was obsessed with recovering actual buried treasure in northeast Florida, and for years Scrantom has been obsessed with recovering the facts of the story.

Fred Dillon, Scrantom’s grandfather, spent more than 10 years, and all of his fortune, in an extensive recovery effort near Mayport, Fla., where the St. Johns River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. That effort ended unsuccessfully, when the Naval Base in Mayport legally took adjoining land, including Dillon’s, to expand the base. Dillon died a few years later, when Scrantom was a young boy, and family lore attributes his death to a heart broken with disappointment.

Dillon’s adventure began around 1950, when he was shown a document detailing the burial of treasure from a Spanish ship in 1839, near present-day Mayport. Having owned a peanut butter factory in Jacksonville, Fla., which he sold in the 1940s, Dillon was flush with money and eager for a new chapter in his life. Persuaded that the document was authentic, he undertook the challenge of recovering the trove.

The recovery efforts spanned over ten years and many prominent local men were involved, including a large construction company, B.B. McCormick & Sons.

“These weren’t some guys in overalls with shovels,” Scrantom said. “McCormick – which did all of the concrete work for Epcot – had a written contract to expend its best efforts to recover the treasure without compensation; it was to be paid by receiving a portion of the treasure recovered. These men believed it was there for the taking.”

Despite a decade of effort, and enormous expenditures of time and money, the treasure remained just out of reach, mostly owing to the high water table at the property, situated very close to the ocean; the excavation site kept filling up with water. In 1958, the U.S. Navy announced that it was going to expand its base and take, under the law of eminent domain, nearby real property, including Dillon’s, starting a period of feverish negotiations between Dillon’s company and the Navy.

Dillon pleaded for this taking not to occur, but his pleas were unfruitful, the taking occurred, Dillon was evicted, and the recovery efforts ceased in 1960. Dillon was devastated with disappointment and died not too long thereafter. Scrantom, his grandson, was only 8 years old when he died. 

“Of course, we all knew about the treasure story,” Scrantom recalled. “I can remember being shown, when I was a child, a small, black and white photo of markings made on trees by the Spanish, to be used as landmarks to locate the treasure.”

After Dillon’s death, the facts of the marvelous tale were consigned to being the occasional topic of family conversation for the next 55 years.

In 2017, Scrantom’s aunt, Dillon’s daughter, notified him that she had discovered a small box of documents relating to the recovery efforts. The most numerous of the documents are dozens and dozens of diagrams, made by Dillon, as he tried to determine the exact spot of the burial.

“You can almost feel the fever in his brow as you look at these complicated diagrams he created,” Scrantom said.

After reviewing all of the documents, Scrantom began an intensive investigation to recover the facts of the story. That investigation led him to such places as historical societies, courthouses, the National Archives and the Mayport area. He even walked the ground on the Naval Base, where he believes the recovery efforts took place.

“Believe me, when I walked that area, I was on high alert for markings on trees or any evidence of Grandaddy’s efforts,” he said. “But, I found none.”

As far as anyone knows, the Navy did not try to recover the treasure – and it is still resting deep in the beach sand near Mayport. 

For the final word in the story, we move backward in time to 1996, more than 20 years before Scrantom began his formal investigation. On a pleasure trip to the Mayport area, Scrantom happened to encounter a stranger, a man named Vic. In the course of exchanging pleasantries, Scrantom mentioned that his grandfather, Fred Dillon, had been a resident of the area.

“Vic’s eyes lit up like he’d seen a ghost. He couldn’t believe that I was Fred Dillon’s grandson,” Scrantom said.

Vic, who had been an employee of McCormick, went on to describe how he participated in the treasure recovery efforts. Vic then went on to say that McCormick, after the taking of the property by the Navy, was awarded the contract to put in the new roads on that portion of the Naval Base.

“Vic told me that he was at the recovery site building roads for the Navy, pushing dirt around on a piece of heavy equipment, when something on the ground caught his eye. He dismounted, picked up the item and it was a Spanish relic of some sort,” Scrantom said.

“It was right in the area where he himself had been participating in the treasure recovery efforts. I asked him what he did after picking up the relic, and he shrugged and said that he remounted the equipment and kept pushing dirt to make the roads.”

The account of Dillon’s adventure will finally get its due. In May, his descendants will be donating the original documents and Scrantom’s research to the Beaches Museum in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., under the name of the Fred E. Dillon Collection. Perhaps with that donation, the family obsession – Dillon’s with the treasure, and his grandson’s with the story – will finally come to rest.