Velda Mound

Velda Mound (8LE44) is a Native Americanarchaeological site in northern Tallahassee, Leon County, Florida, United States. The site consists of a small platform mound, an adjacent plaza, and a surrounding village, and was built and occupied by peoples of the Fort Walton culture, a regional expression of the Mississippian culture, and by their descendants the Apalachee. It is one of only five recorded Fort Walton mound sites in Leon County, and lies about 8.0 kilometres (5 mi) east of the much larger Lake Jackson Mounds, the paramount center of the chiefdom that became the Apalachee Province of Spanish Florida.

A radiocarbon date of about AD 1450 was obtained from the associated village, and the archaeologist B. Calvin Jones considered the site to be one of the last Fort Walton centers built in the Tallahassee area. The mound takes its name from the Velda Dairy, which owned the surrounding pasture in the mid-twentieth century. A 0.77 ha (1.91 acres) parcel containing the mound was donated to the State of Florida in 1982; it is owned by the state, managed by the Division of Historical Resources of the Florida Department of State, and maintained as a neighborhood park with volunteer assistance from the Panhandle Archaeological Society at Tallahassee.