When Hurricane Ian hit East Riverside Drive in the Tice neighborhood, it brought the Caloosahatchee River inside people’s homes.
“It's really intense. It moves everything. There's really no stopping wave action and wind,” Jon Iglehart said.
Iglehart owns a rental home across the road from the river. What was once inside homes on the water, Ian washed onto his property.
“It brought a lot of things out that I think had been buried for even centuries,” Sharon Iglehart, Jon’s daughter, said.
Iglehart and daughters Sharon and Felicia came out to clean up after Ian and were amazed at all they found in their yard.
“Furniture, belongings, photo albums, pictures,” Jon Iglehart said.
“It was really cool to see all the history that had floated in our yard,” Felicia Iglehart said.
"It was also really sad to see all these people's lives in our yard,” Sharon Iglehart added. “They have no idea what happened to it."
Of all they would discover, they had to uncover their most unique find.
“Right about here where we're standing, this fence had been pushed down and had a huge pile of debris over it,” Jon Iglehart said at his property. “And as we were going through the debris, removing it, under a grandfather clock was this canoe.”
And not just any canoe. A single-log dugout canoe. It appeared to be a remnant of an era long ago.
“We have no idea where it came from,” Jon Iglehart said. “I come from a family of (people who like to collect antiques). So, it's like, wow, this is pretty cool. This is awesome. This is quite an object — and it probably has some significance."
To find out the significance, the family donated the canoe to the state. Workers came by to collect it this summer and bring it to Tallahassee.
The canoe is now at the Florida Division of Historical Resources.
"One of the amazing things about archaeology is that there's always more questions to be answered,” Jessica Burns, the head conservator for the Bureau of Archaeological Research, told NBC2.
Burns and the team in Tallahassee are trying to answer those questions. They’ve worked to clean the canoe, preserve it, and have sent out samples for radiocarbon dating.
That can help determine how old it really is.
“We would certainly say it would be a historic canoe. It may be, like, historic post-European contact,” Sam Wilford, the deputy state archaeologist at the Florida Division of Historical Resources, told NBC2. “Right now, we're not sure if it's European or if it's native American. It could be either."
Wilford suspects it’s a post-1600-era canoe. That means it could possibly be a Calusa Indian canoe, though they won’t know until tests come back.
After they do learn more, the canoe will then be available to museums that want to display it.
“This is the story of us. This is the story of Florida,” Burns said. “All these little elements and all these details create the whole story."
And in this story, for all that Hurricane Ian took, it gave people something too: the reminder that, no matter the storm, they will make it through.
Perhaps the canoe is just more proof of that.
“There's a silver lining in every cloud, is how I feel about that,” Iglehart said. “And this is a silver lining."