Sarasota

Fifteen thousand years ago, when humans began to occupy Florida, the Gulf of Mexico was one hundred miles to the west. The accompanying graphic depicts the ancient shoreline in light blue. In this time period, hunting and gathering was the primary means of subsistence. This could only take place in areas where water sources existed for hunter and prey alike. Deep springs and catchment basins such as Warm Mineral Springs were close enough to the Sarasota area to provide camp sites but not enough for permanent settlements. A more welcoming climate advanced southward in Florida as the Pleistocene glaciers began to melt and sea levels began rising the 350 feet necessary to provide the current shoreline.

Archeological research was the primary source of in Sarasota documents more than ten thousand years of seasonal occupation by native peoples. For five thousand years while the current sea level existed, harvesting the bounty of Sarasota Bayprotein. Europeans began to explore the area in the early 1500s. The first recorded contact was in 1513, when a Spanish expedition landed at Charlotte Harbor, just to the south. When the natives encountered the Spaniards, they insulted them in Spanish before a preemptive attack. Apparently, some of their members had enough contact previously with the Spaniards to learn the language and—not to trust them.
Sarasota Bay, the greatest natural asset of the region, was touted to be as beautiful as the bay of Naples by Bertha Potter Palmer, the largest landholder, rancher, and developer of the area, when she established Sarasota as a fashionable location for winter retreats and tourists shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, sports fishing was a great draw and it continued to attract visitors until over-fishing depleted the amazing fish, such as giant gar and tarpon, living in the bay.

One of the earliest pioneer locations preserved in the Sarasota Bay area, Spanish Point, where Bertha Palmer made her winter residence on land originally homesteaded by the Webb family at what they called, Webb Point. She retained most of their structures and greatly expanded the settlement. The pioneer site has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Spanish Point and is open to the public for a fee. Tours of the compound explore the natural history and human occupation of the site through archaeology, historic preservation, and reenactment of some typical pioneer activities of a homestead family along Sarasota Bay. In 1867 Bill Whitaker took the newly arriving, extended Webb family to a bluff south of his that an Indian guide had described to Webb as a good location for a new homestead. Massive mounds indicate that the bluff had been settled frequently during the entire prehistoric human occupation of the bay area. The Webbs had to travel quite a distance for their mail and after almost twenty years, in 1884, John Webb finally petitioned for a separate postal address for Webb Point. They chose Osprey as their postal address, since federal regulations required the use of only one word for the new address. A separate town eventually grew around that postal address.

Women have played a significant role in the development of Sarasota, or at least, contrary to many communities, the history of Sarasota has documented their roles very publicly. Bertha Palmer was not so unusual here, the McClellan sisters were the developers of the subdivision, McClellan Park, that bears their name. It is one of the most significant and successful neighborhoods south of downtown. Many other examples may be found by exploring the county records at the Sarasota History Center.