|
|
The Tampa Bay area.
Click on image for a larger version.
|
When Hernando de Soto landed at the southern end of Tampa Bay in 1539, this rich environment had been home to Native groups for more than 10,000 years. At the time of Spanish contact, the region was home to the Tocobaga Indians, whose principal town was at the Safety Harbor mounds, now Phillipi Park. Tocobaga and earlier people took advantage of the bay’s rich estuarine resources, and constructed great mounds of shell and dirt surrounded by a town plaza. Their population and way of life were extinct only four generations after de Soto and Narváez, mostly due to European diseases.
While Tampa Bay played an important role in European exploration, the focus shifted to the Atlantic coast in the 1560s. St. Augustine was established to protect the critical Gulf Stream shipping route from Havana to Spain, and the west coast of Florida received little attention until 1823 when the federal government established Fort Brooke, whose troops attempted to protect the sparsely populated interior of the peninsula from Seminole Indian expansion. While the Fort could be supplied by sea, travel in the interior flatwoods and wetlands was difficult at best. Due to a variety of factors, the valuable potential of Tampa as an active port was not realized until the 1880s when Henry Plant completed the South Florida Railroad to Port Tampa where a causeway and piers for 26 ocean steamships were constructed. Plant’s opulent Tampa Bay Hotel was intended to surpass those of Henry Flagler on the east coast, but it was finally the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century that caused population to grow from 6,000 to 40,000, and put Tampa on the map.
Entrance to Tampa Bay is through a natural channel north of Egmont Key. The location is marked by Egmont Key Lighthouse and protected by Forts Dade and De Soto constructed during the Spanish-American War. The harbor is deep and well protected, and as a result, Port of Tampa ships three times as much cargo as Florida’s next largest ports. Through the twentieth century Tampa and the adjacent waterfront communities have experienced some of the fastest population growth in the state, and residents continue to depend on and enjoy the natural features of the Gulf, the barrier island beaches and lagoons, the bay, its tributaries, and the surrounding uplands.
|
.
