Laboring in the Fields of the Lord

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One of the great secrets of American history, more than 150 Spanish mission churches once dotted the landscape between modern Miami and the Chesapeake Bay. Built between the 1560s and 1760s, the missions were concentrated in what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia, but until recently their existence - and their influence on the region's native groups - has remained virtually undetected. The wood and thatch buildings burned or rotted away, and sweeping epidemics gradually wiped out the entire population of the Timucua, Guale and Apalachee Indians.