A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF PASCO COUNTY, FLORIDA
From the First Floridians to the Twenty-First Century
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INTRODUCTION
Pasco County occupies a singular position on the map of Florida. Lying on the west-central Gulf coast roughly thirty miles north of Tampa and fifty miles west of Orlando, its 868 square miles stretch from twenty miles of low, mangrove-lined shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico eastward into the gently rolling sand hills of the central peninsula, taking in pine flatwoods, cypress sloughs, sandhill lakes, and the dark waters of the Withlacoochee River as it winds toward the Cove of the Withlacoochee in the northeast. The county sits at the junction of two distinct Florida regions. To its north lies what tourism officials have come to call the Nature Coast, a sparsely settled stretch of swamp, marsh, and spring-fed river that runs almost unbroken to the Big Bend. To its south sprawls the Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater Metropolitan Statistical Area, one of the largest urban regions in the southeastern United States. Pasco is at once a member of both worlds, and the tension between these two identities, between rural tradition and metropolitan expansion, has defined the county for the better part of a century.
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The story of this place is older than the lines that men have drawn upon it. Long before any flag flew over the peninsula, before any county boundary was traced on a map, before any town was platted along a railroad, indigenous peoples lived in the watersheds of the Anclote, the Pithlachascotee, the Hillsborough, and the Withlacoochee. Their middens of oyster shell still rise from the saltmarsh, and their burial mounds still stand in coastal hammocks. After them came Spanish soldiers in iron helmets, English-speaking pioneers from the Carolinas and Georgia, freed and enslaved African Americans, Confederate and Union veterans, German-speaking Catholic immigrants, Greek sponge divers, Russian railroad builders, retirees from the snowbelt of the upper Midwest, and, most recently, families of every background drawn south by the promise of warmth and space. Each wave left some mark on the landscape, and each contributed something to the texture of what is now Pasco County.
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What follows is an attempt at a comprehensive narrative history of that county, beginning some twelve thousand years ago and continuing into the present day. It is the story of how a wilderness of pine and palmetto became a frontier of cattle, citrus, and cypress lumber; how that frontier became a string of small farming towns linked by narrow-gauge rail; how those towns survived freezes, depressions, and wars; how the postwar decades brought retirees and developers to the Gulf coast and transformed the county into one of the fastest-growing in Florida; and how, in the twenty-first century, master-planned suburbs and biomedical research campuses have begun to reshape what had remained, until recently, a place of ranches and orange groves. It is, in short, the story of a county in continual reinvention.
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CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST FLORIDIANS
The land that would become Pasco County emerged from the sea long before any human being walked upon it. During the great glaciations of the Pleistocene epoch, when much of the world’s water was locked up in continental ice sheets, the level of the Gulf of Mexico stood as much as four hundred feet lower than it does today. The Florida peninsula was correspondingly larger, perhaps twice its present width, and its central highlands stood as a chain of sand ridges above a flat coastal plain. As the great glaciers melted and the seas rose, the shoreline crept inland. By about six thousand years ago the coast of the central Gulf approximated something near its modern position, although it has continued to shift in subtle ways ever since.
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The first humans to enter this country are thought to have arrived at least twelve thousand years ago, during the Paleoindian period, when the climate of the peninsula was cooler and drier than at present and the interior was dotted with sinkhole lakes and small springs around which megafauna gathered. These earliest Floridians were small, mobile bands of hunters who pursued mammoth, mastodon, giant tortoise, ground sloth, and the now-extinct horse and camel of North America. They left behind distinctive fluted projectile points, sometimes recovered from sinkholes and river bottoms, and they were the ancestors of all subsequent indigenous populations of the peninsula. As the great mammals disappeared at the close of the Pleistocene, the descendants of these hunters adapted to a warmer, wetter, more diverse Florida.
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By the Archaic period, lasting roughly from 7500 BCE to 500 BCE, the people of the future Pasco County had developed an economy centered on coastal and riverine resources. Fish, shellfish, deer, alligator, turtle, and a wide variety of plant foods supported a growing population. The great shell middens that still mark portions of the Pasco shoreline began to accumulate during this long era. Some of these middens are immense, the slow product of many generations of feasting, and they preserve in their layers a remarkably detailed record of changing climate, sea level, and human diet.
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After 500 BCE, in what archaeologists call the Woodland and post-Woodland periods, the indigenous cultures of west-central Florida grew increasingly complex. They began to manufacture pottery, to build earthen mounds, and to participate in long-distance trade networks that brought copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians, and shell ornaments from the Gulf and Caribbean. Within Pasco County and the surrounding region, the most distinctive late prehistoric culture is what archaeologists call the Safety Harbor culture, named for the type site on the shore of Old Tampa Bay just south of present-day Pasco. The people who built and maintained the Safety Harbor settlements between roughly 900 and 1700 CE were the immediate ancestors of the historic tribe the Spanish would call the Tocobaga.
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THE TOCOBAGA AND THE TIMUCUA
When the first Europeans entered Tampa Bay in the early sixteenth century, they encountered a network of indigenous villages organized into small but politically distinct chiefdoms. The most powerful of these on the bay itself was the Tocobaga, whose principal town stood at the modern site of Philippe Park in Safety Harbor. The name “Tocobaga” first appears in Spanish documents in 1567, when the adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés visited the chief’s town with a small Spanish force and a delegation of Calusa allies brought from southwest Florida. The Tocobaga lived in some twenty or more villages distributed around Tampa Bay and along its tributary rivers, including settlements on the lower Pithlachascotee and Anclote rivers in what is now Pasco County. Each town typically possessed a flat-topped temple mound from which a ceremonial ramp descended toward a central plaza. The chief and his immediate family lived in a structure raised on this principal mound, a clear symbolic statement of his elevated status. Subordinate mounds held the houses of important kin and ritual specialists, while the bulk of the population lived in palm-thatched dwellings clustered around the plaza or along the shore.
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The Tocobaga economy was based on the rich productivity of the bay and its estuaries. They harvested oysters, clams, mullet, sea trout, and a great variety of other fish; they hunted deer, bear, raccoon, and waterfowl in the surrounding hammocks; and they gathered acorns, palm berries, sea grapes, cabbage palm hearts, and many wild plant foods. Although they likely engaged in some small-scale gardening of squash, beans, and maize, agriculture was less central to their lives than it was to their inland neighbors, because the coast offered such abundant alternatives. They were skilled potters who produced distinctive globular vessels with tempering of crushed shell. They used the atlatl, or spear-thrower, in addition to the bow and arrow, and they paddled long dugout canoes through the bay and into the open Gulf.
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To the north and east of the Tocobaga lived peoples affiliated with the great Timucuan-speaking world of north and central Florida. The Timucua were never a single tribe but rather a family of related groups whose villages stretched across the upper peninsula from the Atlantic to the Aucilla River, and whose population at first contact has been estimated at more than 200,000. Within the future Pasco County, particularly along the upper Withlacoochee in the northeast, smaller communities affiliated with the southern Timucuan world appear to have hunted, fished, and farmed in clearings hacked from the longleaf-pine forests. Some early scholarship lumped the Tocobaga and their neighbors the Mocoso and Uzita under the Timucuan umbrella, but linguistic evidence now suggests that they spoke languages distinct from Timucuan proper. What is certain is that in 1500 CE the peninsula was an Indigenous country of many tongues, many alliances, and a population numbering, by some estimates, in the hundreds of thousands.
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THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS
Into this country in 1513 came the first European: Juan Ponce de León, sailing from Puerto Rico in search of land for the Spanish crown. He landed somewhere on the Atlantic coast in April of that year and named the country La Florida for the Easter season of flowers. Several subsequent expeditions probed the Gulf shore of the peninsula. Pánfilo de Narváez landed at Tampa Bay in April 1528 with a force of some four hundred men and forty horses, intending to march overland to the rumored riches of Apalachee in northwest Florida. He encountered Tocobaga and related peoples, fought several skirmishes, and ultimately led his expedition into a disaster so total that only four survivors, including the chronicler Cabeza de Vaca, eventually reached Spanish settlement at Mexico City years later, having walked across most of the continent.
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Even more consequential for the future Pasco County was the expedition of Hernando de Soto, who landed near Tampa Bay in May 1539 with more than six hundred men. De Soto’s army wintered briefly among the bay-area tribes and then marched north on what proved a four-year, ten-thousand-mile rampage through the interior of the American Southeast. The route of de Soto’s march has been heatedly debated by scholars for more than a century, but most modern reconstructions take it through portions of the future Pasco, Hernando, and Citrus counties as the Spanish moved northward along an aboriginal trail that would, three centuries later, become known as the Fort King Road. De Soto’s men did not stay long in any one place, but they brought with them three things that would prove devastating to the indigenous population: war horses, war dogs, and European diseases.
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Of these the diseases were by far the most consequential. Smallpox, measles, mumps, influenza, and other pathogens to which Native Americans had no immunity moved through the peninsula in successive waves over the next two centuries. Some scholars believe that more than ninety percent of the indigenous population of Florida died in this great demographic catastrophe. The Tocobaga, who in the mid-sixteenth century could field hundreds of warriors and dominated Tampa Bay, were reduced by 1700 to scattered remnants. By the time the Spanish formally ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, the original native peoples of west-central Florida had effectively ceased to exist as distinct nations. A small number boarded ships at St. Augustine and sailed with their Spanish patrons to Cuba; others died of disease or were absorbed into other groups. The land that had supported them for millennia was, for the first time in twelve thousand years, very nearly empty of human beings.
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THE SEMINOLE ARRIVE
Into this depopulated peninsula came new peoples. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, bands of Creek-speaking Indians from Georgia and Alabama drifted south across the Suwannee and the Aucilla. They were drawn by abandoned hunting grounds, by Spanish offers of land and trade, and, increasingly after the American Revolution, by the pressure of expanding Anglo settlement to the north. Most of these migrants were members of the Lower Creek towns, particularly the towns of the Hitchiti and Muscogee dialects. They were joined by smaller numbers of Yamasee, Yuchi, and other groups, and by African Americans who had escaped slavery in the British colonies. The Spanish authorities at St. Augustine called these newcomers cimarrones, meaning “wild” or “runaway.” Over time, in the mouths of English speakers, the word became “Seminole.”
By the early nineteenth century the Seminoles had established themselves throughout the Florida peninsula. They built villages of palmetto-thatched chickees, cultivated extensive fields of corn, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane, and pastured large herds of cattle and hogs descended from animals introduced by the Spaniards. Several major Seminole towns stood within the watershed of the Withlacoochee, including some in what would become northeastern Pasco County. The Cove of the Withlacoochee, the marshy floodplain country where the river enters Lake Tsala Apopka in present-day Citrus County, became a central stronghold of Seminole resistance during the wars of the 1830s.
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THE FIRST SEMINOLE WAR AND TRANSFER TO THE UNITED STATES
After the United States gained its independence and pushed its boundary down to the thirty-first parallel, friction along the Spanish Florida border grew steadily. Slaveholders from Georgia and the Carolinas complained that Florida had become a refuge for escaped slaves, and white settlers coveted the rich farmland of the panhandle and central peninsula. In 1818, General Andrew Jackson led an expedition into Spanish Florida ostensibly to suppress Seminole raiding parties. He destroyed several Indian towns, executed two British subjects accused of inciting the Indians, and effectively demonstrated that Spain could not defend its remote colony. The action precipitated the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, by which Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States in exchange for the assumption of certain American claims. The territory formally passed to the United States in 1821, with Andrew Jackson serving briefly as its first territorial governor.
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The new Territory of Florida, which then included everything south of Georgia and east of the Perdido River, organized rapidly under American rule. Its earliest political subdivisions were the great panhandle counties of Escambia and St. Johns; later, vast central counties such as Hillsborough, Alachua, and Orange were carved from these. The future Pasco County was, in the first generation of American rule, attached at various times to Hillsborough and then to Hernando, but in practical terms the country between the Withlacoochee and the Hillsborough remained an Indigenous land. White settlement was thin, mostly along the coastal trails north of Tampa Bay and along the Spanish-era Fort King Road that ran north from the army post at Fort Brooke (modern Tampa) to Fort King near present-day Ocala.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE SEMINOLE WARS AND THE PIONEER FRONTIER
The decades following the American acquisition of Florida brought a long and ultimately tragic conflict between the federal government and the Seminole peoples. In 1823 the United States imposed upon the Seminoles the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, by which the tribe ceded most of north Florida in exchange for a large reservation in the central peninsula. The northern boundary of this reservation ran in part along the Withlacoochee and into the country south of what is now Pasco County. The treaty was deeply unpopular among Seminoles, who chafed at the boundary’s poor land, the meddling of federal agents, and the constant pressure of white squatters. Worse was to follow. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the relocation of all eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi. In 1832 federal commissioners pressured a small number of Seminole headmen into signing the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, which committed the entire tribe to removal within three years. Most Seminoles rejected the treaty as fraudulent. By the autumn of 1835, a war was all but inevitable.
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THE DADE MASSACRE AND THE SECOND SEMINOLE WAR
It began on the Fort King Road in what is now Sumter County, just north of present-day Pasco. On December 28, 1835, a column of 108 American soldiers under the command of Brevet Major Francis Langhorne Dade was marching north from Fort Brooke to reinforce the garrison at Fort King. Major Dade was a Virginian by birth, a career officer with extensive frontier experience, and the column under his command consisted of detachments from two artillery and one infantry regiment. As his men moved through the open pine flatwoods near a place known as the Wahoo Swamp, they were ambushed by some 180 Seminole and African Seminole warriors under the joint command of the chiefs Micanopy, Jumper, and Alligator. The first volley killed Dade himself and roughly half his men. Within hours the entire command was destroyed. Only three soldiers escaped the field alive, of whom two survived to reach Fort Brooke.
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The Dade Massacre, as it came to be called, shocked the United States. It was followed within hours by the equally shocking assassination of the federal Indian agent Wiley Thompson outside Fort King by the war leader Osceola. With these two events the Second Seminole War, the longest and most expensive Indian conflict in American history, began in earnest. It would last seven years, cost the lives of fifteen hundred American regulars and an unknown but larger number of Seminoles, drain the federal treasury of some forty million dollars, and reshape the geography and population of central Florida.
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In response to the disaster on the Fort King Road, the United States Army moved aggressively to garrison the country between Tampa Bay and the Withlacoochee. General Edmund Pendleton Gaines led a relief expedition from Tampa in early 1836; later in the same year, General Thomas Sidney Jesup assumed overall command of operations in Florida and began a systematic strategy of building fortified supply depots deep within Seminole territory. Several of these forts stood within the future Pasco County. The first was Fort Alabama, established
in late 1836 on the south bank of the Hillsborough River near a Seminole crossing. After being abandoned and reoccupied, the post was rebuilt under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel William S. Foster of the 4th U.S. Infantry and renamed Fort Foster in his honor. Fort Foster stood about nine miles south of the future site of Zephyrhills and served as a critical link in the chain of military posts running north from Fort Brooke. The post was the scene of skirmishes with Seminole war parties in 1837 and again in subsequent reactivations through 1849. Today the reconstructed fort, on the grounds of Hillsborough River State Park just south of the Pasco line, is one of the few well-preserved Second Seminole War sites in the state.
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Far more important to Pasco County’s later history was Fort Dade, built on the south bank of the Withlacoochee River at the crossing of the Fort King Road. The order to construct it was issued by General Jesup on December 23, 1836, exactly one year after Major Dade’s column had departed Fort Brooke on its fatal march. By Christmas Day, Lieutenant Colonel Foster’s command was busy raising the new post, which Jesup directed should bear the name of the gallant and lamented officer. Fort Dade was a stockaded blockhouse fortification with supporting outbuildings, surrounded by a cleared field of fire, and it stood in the very heart of Seminole settlement country. In March 1837 a remarkable event took place within its walls. General Jesup met with the Seminole chiefs Jumper and Alligator, and with representatives of Micanopy, to negotiate what would come to be called the Fort Dade Capitulation. By the terms of that agreement, the Seminoles were to gather at Tampa Bay for transportation west of the Mississippi. Many gathered as agreed, but Osceola and other resistance leaders raided the assembly point and led a great body of the people back into the swamps and hammocks. The war resumed and continued for five more years.
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Fort Dade continued in service as a supply depot and observation post during the long contest that followed. It was finally abandoned in 1849, after the brief Third Seminole War of 1855 to 1858 had not yet broken out. Today nothing remains of the post itself. A historical marker erected by the Florida Board of Parks and Historic Memorials in 1966 stood for many years along U.S. 301 about seven miles north of the modern city of Dade City, though the marker itself has since been reported missing. The town of Dade City, the village that would eventually become the seat of Pasco County, is named for the original Fort Dade, and through it for Major Francis Dade himself.
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Several smaller posts and blockhouses, the names of many of which have been lost, also stood within the present county during the war. The Fort King Road ran the length of eastern Pasco from south to north, crossing the Hillsborough River near Fort Foster, climbing the sand ridges past Fort Dade, and continuing to Fort King. After the war, this road, beaten and braced and patrolled for a generation, became the principal pioneer highway into the interior of central Florida. The pattern of early settlement in eastern Pasco closely follows its course.
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THE FIRST PIONEERS
The Armed Occupation Act of 1842, passed by Congress to consolidate the gains of the Second Seminole War, opened the south of Florida to settlement by offering 160-acre tracts to any white head of household who would build a habitation, plant five acres, and remain on the land in arms for five years. Hundreds of pioneer families from the older states of the South, particularly from Georgia and the Carolinas, took up the offer. Many of them moved into the country that would become Pasco County, where the abandoned Seminole fields and the still-fertile hammock soils held out a promise of cheap land for those willing to defend it.
Among the earliest documented settlers within Pasco’s modern boundaries was Thomas Tucker, a Georgia native who is said to have arrived around 1842 and to have planted what tradition holds was Pasco County’s first orange grove in 1845. Tucker settled in the eastern uplands along what is now Old Lakeland Highway northeast of Zephyrhills. The little community that grew up around his homestead became known as Tuckertown; in October 1876 a post office was established under that name. Other early surnames in the eastern reaches of the future county included Wells, Kersey, Boyette, Gillette, Godwin, McLeod, Osburn, and Ryals, families whose descendants are present in the county to this day. In what would become the Wesley Chapel area, the Boyettes, Gillettes, Godwins, and Kerseys received land grants in the 1840s; the place was first known as Double Branch, for the twin creeks running across the Boyette land, and was sometimes called Gatorville by its residents long before it acquired the name of the Methodist meetinghouse erected at the corner of what is now State Road 54 and Boyette Road.
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Settlement was slower along the Gulf coast, where mosquitoes, low ground, and a lack of natural harbors discouraged farmers. Even so, by the late 1840s a few hardy families had taken up residence along the lower Pithlachascotee and Anclote rivers. The Aripeka area in the northwest corner of what would become Pasco took its name from the Seminole chief Aripeika, also known as Sam Jones, who had eluded American forces throughout the Second Seminole War and refused to surrender. The villages of Anclote, Bailey’s Bluff, and Hudson developed as small fishing and turpentine settlements, of which Anclote in particular grew rapidly in the years after the Civil War. The Spanish word anclote, meaning a small anchor or stone used to moor a vessel, had been applied to the river and offshore key by Spanish charts dating to the sixteenth century, and the name passed without translation into American usage.
THE THIRD SEMINOLE WAR AND THE END OF THE FRONTIER
The Second Seminole War formally ended in 1842, but Seminole removal was never complete. Several hundred Seminoles remained in the swamps and hammocks of south Florida, including the country south of the Withlacoochee. In December 1855, after years of escalating tension over surveying parties in the Big Cypress and Everglades, fighting broke out again in what is called the Third Seminole War. Most of the engagements took place far to the south of the future Pasco County, but militia patrols and supply movements crossed eastern Pasco repeatedly. Fort Dade was briefly reactivated, and several blockhouses along the old Fort King Road saw service. By May 1858, when the Third Seminole War ended with the surrender or removal of most of the remaining hostile bands, the Indigenous era of west-central Florida had effectively closed. A small remnant of perhaps two or three hundred Seminoles withdrew permanently into the southernmost reaches of the peninsula. The country between the Withlacoochee and Tampa Bay was, for the first time since the late Archaic period, fully open to settlement under a single sovereign power.
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CHAPTER THREE
HERNANDO COUNTY, THE CIVIL WAR, AND THE PIONEER ECONOMY
In 1843, even before Florida formally entered the Union as a state, the Territorial Council had created Hernando County out of portions of Alachua, Hillsborough, and Orange counties. As originally drawn, Hernando County encompassed a vast tract of west-central Florida including all of the future Citrus and Pasco counties as well as the modern Hernando County itself. The new county was named for Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador whose expedition had passed near or through the area three centuries earlier. Briefly between 1844 and 1849, the county was renamed Benton County after Thomas Hart Benton, the influential Missouri senator who had helped to draft the Armed Occupation Act. When Benton came out against the extension of slavery, the Florida legislature in retaliation restored the older name, and Hernando it remained.
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In 1855, town founder Joseph Hale donated land for a county courthouse in the center of what would become the city of Brooksville, named for the Virginia congressman Preston Brooks, who in 1856 famously caned Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The courthouse was completed shortly thereafter, and Brooksville became the seat of a Hernando County that then extended from the Withlacoochee in the north to Tampa Bay in the south. For more than three decades, the future Pasco County was simply the southern half of Hernando, governed from a courthouse forty miles to the north of its principal settlements.
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THE ANTEBELLUM ECONOMY
In the years between the Third Seminole War and the Civil War, the pioneer economy of southern Hernando County rested on three pillars: open-range cattle ranching, subsistence agriculture, and small-scale lumbering. Cattle were the most important commodity. The descendants of Spanish-era stock, hardy and lean and capable of surviving on the wiregrass and palmetto of the flatwoods, ranged largely unfenced over thousands of square miles. Pioneer “cow hunters” — the term “cowboy” was not commonly used in early Florida — drove herds to shipping points at Tampa, Bayport, and other coastal villages for export to Cuba, where Spanish authorities paid in gold doubloons. The Florida cattle trade was a substantial business, and many of the pioneer fortunes of west-central Florida were built upon it.
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Subsistence farming centered on corn, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, peas, and garden vegetables, with a small amount of cotton grown on the better soils. Wild game remained abundant: white-tailed deer, wild turkey, black bear, alligator, and an immense variety of waterfowl and freshwater fish were staples of the pioneer diet. Sugar cane was grown for syrup, which was a year-round sweetener and a means of preserving fruit. Honeybees, originally introduced from Europe, had spread widely through the woods, and “bee hunting” was a common pastime among pioneer boys.
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Small sawmills sprang up along the rivers and the new wagon roads to supply lumber for local building, and “naval stores” — turpentine, pitch, and rosin produced by tapping and distilling the resin of the longleaf pine — became an early export commodity. The vast pine forests of central Pasco’s flatwoods would support a substantial turpentine industry into the twentieth century, often worked by a mix of free and enslaved laborers in the antebellum years and by African American and immigrant laborers thereafter.
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Enslaved African Americans were a smaller proportion of the population in the cattle country of southern Hernando than in the plantation belt of north Florida, but they were present in considerable numbers. The 1860 census recorded several hundred enslaved people in the county. They worked on the larger farms and in the turpentine camps, drove cattle, hauled lumber, and labored in the homes of the more prosperous families. Their descendants would form an important component of Pasco’s population after emancipation, particularly in the eastern communities of Trilby, Lacoochee, Dade City, and Richland.
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THE CIVIL WAR
When Florida seceded from the Union in January 1861, the pioneer counties of west-central Florida joined the Confederacy with a great show of enthusiasm. The white population of southern Hernando, like the white population of most of the state, was overwhelmingly southern in origin and sympathy, and dozens of young men enlisted in Florida regiments and rode off to the great battles of Tennessee and northern Virginia. A smaller but still significant number of southern Hernando men served in Union forces, including some who joined the 2nd Florida Cavalry, U.S.A., a regiment of Florida Unionists organized at Fort Myers in 1863 and 1864. The bitter local divisions that this dual service produced would echo for generations in family memory.
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Pasco’s geography spared it from any major military engagement. The closest battles were the Battle of Tampa in late June 1862, a brief naval bombardment in which Union gunboats exchanged fire with Confederate batteries; and the engagement at Bayport in Hernando County, where federal landings and militia skirmishes occurred at various times during the blockade. The U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Gulf coast cut off the cattle trade with Cuba, devastating the region’s principal source of cash income; cattle drives east to feed Confederate armies in Georgia and the Carolinas partially replaced the lost market. By war’s end, the herds had been heavily reduced, and the inland economy of the county was in serious disarray.
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The most lasting Civil War legacy in the area was demographic. A small but steady stream of southern soldiers who had passed through Florida during the war returned after the conflict, drawn by the climate and the cheap land, and joined the pioneer population. After the war, a smaller but eventually consequential migration of Union veterans began, men who had similarly been impressed by the country during their service and who would later be courted by land developers seeking buyers in the North. The pattern of veteran-driven settlement that would later produce the founding of Zephyrhills was rooted in these post-Civil War years.
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RECONSTRUCTION AND THE 1870s
Florida’s experience of Reconstruction was marked by political turbulence, paramilitary violence, and the eventual restoration of conservative Democratic control by 1877. In the cattle and farming country of southern Hernando, Reconstruction was more about economic recovery than about political theater. Freedmen organized small communities, often around new churches and schools, and the federal Freedmen’s Bureau briefly maintained a presence in nearby Brooksville. Many freed people remained on the land where they had been enslaved, working as tenant farmers and turpentine hands, and a few acquired their own homesteads under postwar federal land laws.
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By the 1870s the cattle trade with Cuba had largely resumed, although increasing regulation by both Spanish authorities and the United States government had complicated it. The lumber and naval-stores industries grew steadily. Citrus, which had been grown on a small scale in west-central Florida since pioneer days, began to expand as the railroads pushed south and east, opening northern markets. By 1880 the federal census recorded a Hernando County population — still including all of the future Citrus and Pasco counties — of about 4,200, more than triple what it had been a generation earlier. Of those, a substantial minority lived in the southern third of the county, in scattered settlements such as Tuckertown, Fort Dade, Anclote, Hudson, Aripeka, Hammock Plains, and Wesley Chapel.
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In 1881, an event of extraordinary consequence for Florida and for the future Pasco County occurred: a Philadelphia industrialist named Hamilton Disston, son of the founder of the Disston saw company, agreed to purchase four million acres of state land at twenty-five cents an acre. The transaction provided Florida with desperately needed revenue to pay its bondholders and effectively rescued the state from financial collapse, and it placed in Disston’s hands a vast inventory of cheap land scattered across the peninsula. Disston paid his lawyers and agents in land rather than cash, and one of the parcels conveyed in this way would become the seed of a Catholic colony in eastern Pasco County. The other great consequence of the Disston purchase was the encouragement it gave to railroad construction. With cheap land and rising population, capitalists at last found reasons to lay rails into the peninsula’s interior. Within four years of the Disston purchase, two competing rail lines would push into what is now Pasco County, and the entire pattern of settlement would be transformed.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE RAILROADS AND THE BIRTH OF NEW TOWNS
The story of Pasco County in the 1880s is, above all, the story of the railroads. Two great trunk lines arrived in the decade, each transforming the country it crossed. The first was the Florida Southern Railway, which became part of Henry B. Plant’s growing South Florida Railroad system. Plant, a Connecticut Yankee who had built a transportation empire across the Southeast after the Civil War, extended his lines south from Sanford toward Tampa Bay. By the mid-1880s, his trains ran through eastern Pasco, with depots at Owensboro, Macon (soon to be renamed Trilby), Richland, and a station called Hatton at the future site of Dade City. The Plant line gave eastern Pasco a direct connection to the great fruit and produce markets of the North, and it accelerated the growth of citrus, vegetable farming, and lumbering throughout the region.
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THE ORANGE BELT RAILWAY
Far more dramatic in its effects, however, was the construction of the Orange Belt Railway. Its prime mover was an extraordinary figure named Peter Demens — born Pyotr Alexeyevich Dementyev in Russia in 1850, a former officer of the Imperial Guard and a Tolstoyan idealist who had emigrated to Florida in 1880 after political troubles. Demens settled in Longwood, north of Orlando, where he established a sawmill and a small contracting business. In 1885 he found himself in possession of the charter of a struggling Orange Belt Railway company, taken in payment for unpaid bills of crossties from his mill. The original Orange Belt charter authorized a thirty-five-mile narrow-gauge line from Lake Monroe near Sanford to Lake Apopka. Demens, with a passion that astonished his backers, extended the project clear across the peninsula to the Gulf.
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The 152-mile, three-foot narrow-gauge line ran from Sanford southwest through Apopka, Forest City, Mount Dora, and out into the open pine country of what is now Lake County, then northwestward to Trilby (then called Macon) in northeastern Pasco, then southwest down across the future county through San Antonio, Drexel, Ehren, Gowers Corner, Odessa, and on into Pinellas, terminating at a sandy bluff overlooking Tampa Bay. The first passenger train on the Orange Belt arrived at the new town of San Antonio in Pasco County on February 13, 1888, after a wintry trip across a half-built roadbed. The final spike was driven a few months later at the terminus on Tampa Bay, which Demens christened St. Petersburg in honor of the Russian capital of his youth. The Armour meatpacking company of Chicago, which had advanced critical financing in the closing months of construction, helped underwrite the extension. At completion, the Orange Belt was one of the longest narrow-gauge railroads in the United States.
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For Pasco the consequences were immediate. The Orange Belt cut diagonally across the still-largely-empty west and center of the county, drawing settlement to a string of new whistle-stop villages: Land O’ Lakes (originally Ehren), Drexel, Ehren, Gowers Corner, Denham, Odessa, and others. It connected San Antonio and St. Leo directly to St. Petersburg and to the eastern seaboard. The line went into receivership in the wake of the Panic of 1893, and the Great Freeze of 1894–95 destroyed much of the citrus traffic upon which its viability depended. Henry B. Plant acquired it in 1895, converted the line to standard gauge, and integrated it into his system. In 1902 the Plant System was absorbed into the Atlantic Coast Line, and in 1967 the Atlantic Coast Line merged with the Seaboard Air Line to form the Seaboard Coast Line, which in turn became part of CSX. The original Orange Belt right-of-way has been gradually abandoned over the past century, but considerable portions of it survive today as the Pinellas Trail and, more recently, as the proposed Orange Belt Trail across Pasco itself.
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THE FOUNDING OF SAN ANTONIO AND ST. LEO
The most distinctive of all the new communities founded along the Orange Belt was the Catholic colony of San Antonio. Its founder was Edmund Francis Dunne, a remarkable figure whose life had carried him from upstate New York to the Arizona Territory and at last to the rolling hills of eastern Pasco. Born in Little Falls, New York, in 1835, Dunne was of Irish ancestry and was raised in Ohio, where his father helped settle Irish immigrants. He read law, was admitted to the bar, and embarked on a peripatetic career that took him to Nevada — where he helped draft the state constitution in 1864 — and then to Arizona, where he served from 1870 to 1872 as Chief Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court. Dunne was a devout Catholic in a country and time of significant anti-Catholic prejudice, and his service in Arizona had been marked by political conflicts in which he believed his religion had been used against him. After leaving the bench he practiced law in Florida, San Francisco, and Chicago, where in 1881 he became involved as legal counsel in Hamilton Disston’s purchase of state land. As part of his compensation, Dunne received an option on roughly 100,000 acres of central Florida wilderness west of Dade City.
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Dunne conceived an audacious plan. He would establish on this land a Catholic colony, a community in which Catholic immigrants from the North and from Europe could find religious freedom, fertile soil, and the security of common faith. He spent much of 1881 traveling Florida on horseback in search of the right site, and on February 15, 1881 — the feast day of Saint Jovita, an obscure second-century Italian martyr — he and his cousin Captain Hugh Dunne arrived at a chain of lakes in the rolling hill country south of Hernando County’s center. The view from the highest hill so impressed Judge Dunne that he resolved on the spot to make it his own. He named the principal body of water Lake Jovita for the saint of the day, gave the site at large the name San Antonio for Saint Anthony of Padua, and began to lay out a town.
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The early years of the colony were difficult. Until the late 1880s, San Antonio was reachable only by oxcart from the railhead at Wildwood, forty miles to the northeast. The nearest port was Tampa, thirty miles to the south. Yet settlers came: a survey of the colony in June 1883 counted 130 residents; by 1885 the figure had grown to about 500. Most were German or Irish Catholic families from the cities of the upper Midwest, drawn by Dunne’s persistent advertising and by the Disston land company’s promotional efforts. They cleared land for citrus, planted vegetables and small grains, and built simple frame houses around a central plaza in which Dunne had reserved space for a church, a school, and public gatherings.
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In 1882, the third pastor of the colony’s St. Anthony of Padua parish, Father Gerard Pilz, O.S.B., arrived. He was a Benedictine monk sent at the request of Bishop John Moore of the Diocese of St. Augustine, who had asked the Archabbey of Saint Vincent in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for a priest who could minister to both German- and English-speaking settlers. Father Pilz became the first Benedictine in Florida and the founder of what would become one of the most important Catholic institutions in the state.
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Dunne’s wife, Josephine, who had played an important role in the organization and recruitment of the colony, died in 1883. Dunne himself remained at his cabin on the southern shore of Lake Jovita for several more years, but by 1889 he was preparing to leave. Before his departure he made a gift of historic consequence: he conveyed his residence and the surrounding hilltop property to the Benedictine Order of Mary Help of Christians Abbey in Belmont, North Carolina. On June 4, 1889, Abbot Leo Haid of Belmont formally founded both Saint Leo College and the Benedictine mission that would later become Saint Leo Abbey on the lands given by Dunne. In February of the same year, four Benedictine sisters from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, had arrived to establish what would grow into Holy Name Monastery and a girls’ academy. Saint Leo was elevated to an independent priory in 1894 and to an abbey on September 25, 1902, by Pope Leo XIII. The first abbot was Father Charles Mohr, O.S.B., who had come down from Belmont with the founding group.
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The town of St. Leo was incorporated on June 4, 1891, making it the oldest incorporated municipality within the boundaries of Pasco County. San Antonio was incorporated on August 7, 1891. Together, the twin towns formed the heart of what residents proudly called the Catholic Colony. In the decades that followed, the monks of St. Leo founded Catholic parishes throughout west-central Florida, including parishes at Dade City, Zephyrhills, New Port Richey, Brooksville, and Crystal River. The current St. Anthony of Padua Church, dedicated by Bishop William Kenny of St. Augustine on March 21, 1911, remains the oldest Catholic church building in Pasco County. Saint Leo College survived periods of severe difficulty in the 1960s and 1970s, including a brief closure, and eventually emerged as Saint Leo University, today one of the larger Catholic universities in the southeastern United States, with extension programs at military bases and online programs reaching tens of thousands of students worldwide.
OTHER NEW COMMUNITIES OF THE 1880s
In the eastern part of the county, the older village of Tuckertown was renamed Richland in 1886, a name better suited to its post-office and railroad station. Just north of it, the community of Macon prospered briefly as a junction of two railroads, the Florida Railway and Navigation Company and the South Florida Railroad, until railroad magnate Henry B. Plant ordered its name changed to avoid duplication with Macon, Georgia. According to local tradition, Plant renamed the town Trilby in 1895 after the heroine of George du Maurier’s enormously popular novel of that name, published in 1894. Streets in the new Trilby plat were given names from the novel: Svengali, Little Billie, Taffy, and so on. A few of these street names survive on contemporary maps. Just south of Macon, the community of Owensboro briefly prospered at the same rail junction and was even put forward as a candidate for the new Pasco County seat in 1887, but it slowly faded after the citrus trade collapsed and its rail importance diminished. Today only the Owensboro Swamp and the southern terminus of the Withlacoochee State Trail mark its existence.
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Hatton, the small settlement at the railroad stop nearest Fort Dade, drew settlers and merchants away from the older Fort Dade community when it became clear the rail line would bypass the original town. The new community was incorporated under the name Dade City, taking the historic name of the abandoned fort with it. The incorporation appears to have first occurred in 1884 or 1885 and then to have been allowed to lapse; a fresh incorporation followed Florida legislative approval on June 5, 1889. The post office, originally established in 1845 in the home of pioneer James Gibbons, had been abandoned upon his death less than a year later. A new Dade City post office was established in 1884 on what is now Church Avenue.
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Other new settlements of the late 1880s and 1890s included Earnestville, in the central county; Drexel and Denham along the Orange Belt; Ellerslie, briefly a citrus town and now vanished; Anclote, a sponge and fishing settlement on the river of the same name; Blanton, a small farming community; and Loyce, Hammock Plains, and a dozen others now reduced to crossroads or absorbed into larger places. The 1887 era of Pasco was, in essence, an explosion of new towns made possible by the railroads, by cheap state land, and by the optimism of an age that believed in the perfectibility of the southern frontier.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE CREATION OF PASCO COUNTY
By the mid-1880s, southern Hernando County was thoroughly dissatisfied with its political situation. Hernando was vast — running from the Withlacoochee in the north to Tampa Bay in the south, a north-south distance of more than sixty miles. The county seat at Brooksville lay near the center of the county and was thus inconvenient to the citizens of the southern townships; a trip to court or to record a deed could mean a two- or three-day journey by wagon. Across the state, similar movements for the division of oversized frontier counties had been gaining strength, and the Florida legislature was generally amenable.
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On June 2, 1887, Governor Edward A. Perry signed into law a bill “to divide the County of Hernando, and to create and establish the Counties of Pasco and Citrus from portions of Hernando.” The new Citrus County was carved from the northern third of the old Hernando, the new Pasco from the southern third. Hernando County itself, much reduced in area, retained the central section around Brooksville.
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The new county was named in honor of Samuel Pasco, a prominent Florida politician who was on the verge of being elected to the United States Senate. Pasco’s career was unusual. He had been born in London, England, in 1834, to a family of Cornish ancestry, and had immigrated with his parents first to Prince Edward Island in 1841 and then to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1843. He attended public schools in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University in 1858. The following year, this Boston-bred New Englander moved to Florida, where he took up duties as principal of the Waukeenah Academy in Jefferson County, near Monticello in the panhandle. When the Civil War broke out, Pasco enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private in the Third Florida Volunteer Infantry. He fought through several engagements, was wounded and captured at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in November 1863, and spent the remainder of the war in the Union prison camp at Camp Morton in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was paroled in March 1865 with the rank of sergeant. He is remembered as the only Confederate private ever to be elected to the United States Senate.
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After the war, Pasco returned to teaching at Waukeenah Academy, read law, and was admitted to the Florida bar in 1868. He served as clerk of the circuit court of Jefferson County from 1866 to 1868 and became active in Democratic politics. He was a presidential elector in 1880, served as president of the Florida constitutional convention of 1885 — which produced the state constitution under which Florida operated for more than three generations — and served briefly in 1887 as Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. In the spring of that year, with Senator Charles W. Jones of Florida absent from his post for reasons of illness (Jones would eventually die in an asylum), the legislature elected Pasco to fill the vacancy. The naming of the new county after Samuel Pasco was thus simultaneous with his elevation to the Senate. He served two full terms, until 1899, and was thereafter a member of the Isthmian Canal Commission that oversaw the early planning of the Panama Canal. He never actually visited the county that bore his name, but the name was retained in his honor. He died in Tampa in 1917 and was buried in his beloved Monticello.
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When Pasco County was established, Governor Perry exercised his statutory authority to designate Dade City as the temporary county seat and to appoint the first board of county commissioners and other officials. The choice of Dade City was not universally welcomed. Owensboro, the rail junction in the northeast, had its partisans, and the town of San Antonio also had supporters. On March 14, 1889, a Dade City businessman named W. B. Lynch presented a petition signed by 320 voters asking for an election on the location of the permanent county seat. The election was set for April 11, 1889. According to local tradition, election day was a remarkable affair. Henry Macon and Dan Hatfield, leading African American residents of the county, donned long black swagger coats, tall silk hats, and broad silken sashes, and led a procession of Black voters two by two through the streets behind a banner reading “Dade City for the court house.” Despite fears of ballot-box stuffing — a Pasadena resident, John Waller, stood watch to discourage any tampering — the election was held on schedule. When the votes were counted, Dade City had carried the day with 432 votes out of 765 cast. The board of county commissioners certified the result on April 16, and Dade City became the permanent county seat of Pasco County.
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The first courthouse was a temporary structure offered by the Dade City businessmen Coleman and Ferguson. A more substantial wooden courthouse was erected shortly thereafter. The historic Pasco County Courthouse that stands today at the corner of Seventh Street and Meridian Avenue in Dade City was completed in 1909, designed by the architect Edward Columbus Hosford in a stately Classical Revival style. With its central dome and broad porticoes, it remains one of the finest small county courthouses in Florida. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and has been restored on several occasions. It still serves as a working courthouse alongside a larger modern judicial center.
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The first board of county commissioners convened in 1887 to begin the work of organizing the new county: establishing voting precincts, appointing officials, fixing the rate of property tax, organizing a school system. Augustine H. Ravesies was appointed the first superintendent of schools. The county initially counted thirty-seven teachers, and by 1896 the school system had grown to forty-two schools, forty-eight teachers, and 1,123 students. The first census taken of the new county, in 1890, returned a population of 4,249.
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CHAPTER SIX
THE GREAT FREEZE AND THE FIRST GENERATION
The new county was scarcely seven years old when it was struck by a calamity that nearly broke it. The winter of 1894–95 brought to Florida what came to be known as the Great Freeze, the most devastating cold snap ever to strike the state’s commercial agriculture. The first blow came on the night of December 28–29, 1894. A great Arctic air mass plunged south through the central peninsula. Temperatures fell to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at Orlando and lower still in some interior locations. In Pasco County, where the moderating influence of the Gulf had been thought to provide a measure of protection, the thermometers at the interior town of St. Leo dropped to 16.8 degrees. Even the coastal stations recorded readings near or below freezing. The fruit on the trees froze solid; in some groves a hard rind of ice formed around each orange, and the fruit shattered when handled.
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For a moment in January and early February, the country thought it had been spared the worst. A warm, wet spell came on, and the orange trees, deceived by the unseasonable warmth, broke their dormancy and put out tender new growth. Then on February 7, 1895, the second great freeze hit. This time the cold was even more penetrating, and because the trees were full of rising sap and tender shoots, the damage was incomparably worse than in December. The sap inside the trunks froze and expanded, splitting the bark from the wood. Entire orchards, planted and tended for a decade, were killed outright. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the value of citrus land in central Florida fell from a thousand dollars an acre before the freeze to ten dollars an acre after it. The state’s annual citrus production crashed from six million boxes to fewer than 100,000.
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The chronicler of pioneer Pasco, J. A. Hendley, captured the human cost in a passage that became locally famous: “Darkened like a funeral pall which swept over it when every fruit tree in Florida was killed. I stood upon the bank of the lake and watched the wagons filled with sorrowful-looking men and women on their way back north. They had built their houses and made their groves and then saw them swept away in one night by the cold winds of the northwest. They had risked all and lost, and now they were abandoning what was left of their once beautiful homes.”
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The freeze affected every community in Pasco. San Antonio, whose Catholic colonists had invested their savings in citrus, was particularly hard hit. The Orange Belt Railway, which had depended for its freight on the very citrus that now lay dead in the groves, slid into bankruptcy. The town of Earnestville, dependent on its groves, faded entirely from the map; today it is remembered only in scholarly literature as an example of a Florida community erased by the freeze. Ellerslie, in the same predicament, succumbed to the combined effects of the disaster and an internal land-ownership dispute. The town of Tuckertown — by now Richland — saw its citrus economy collapse but managed, on the strength of its rail station and farming community, to survive.
Yet Pasco County did not die. Many of its residents, including the Catholic colonists of San Antonio, chose to stay. They replanted with hardier varieties, diversified into vegetable crops and livestock, expanded the lumber and turpentine industries, and waited for the citrus trade to come back. The center of Florida’s citrus belt shifted permanently south to Polk, Lake, and Orange counties, but Pasco kept a foothold in the industry, particularly with the cold-hardy kumquat, which would much later become a regional specialty and the namesake of Dade City’s signature winter festival. By the early years of the twentieth century, the worst was over.
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ANCLOTE, HUDSON, AND THE GULF COAST
While the inland country struggled to recover from the freeze, a different kind of community had taken root along the Gulf. The little port of Anclote, established in 1867 by Captain Eli M. Meyer and his family from Marion County, had grown into a sponge-fishing settlement of considerable importance. In 1869, Captain Meyer’s son Wyatt became the first child born at Anclote. By the early 1870s, spongers from Key West had begun to harvest sponges in the shallow Gulf waters off Anclote and Bailey’s Bluff, using Anclote as a stopover point. Many of these spongers were of British West Indian and Bahamian descent, and Anclote in the 1870s and 1880s was a polyglot fishing settlement with a markedly different culture from the inland farming country.
The hooking of sponges from skiffs gave way in the 1890s to true sponge diving, brought to the region by Greek immigrants. In 1891 John Cheyney organized the Anclote and Rock Island Sponge Company, with backing from Hamilton Disston’s enterprises, and the sponge trade grew explosively. The center of the industry shifted from Anclote itself south to the Pinellas County town of Tarpon Springs, where a community of Greek immigrants from Kalymnos, Symi, and other Aegean islands established what would become the largest natural sponge market in the western hemisphere. Anclote remained a quiet outpost. The Anclote Key Lighthouse, built in 1887 on the offshore key of the same name, guided ships to the river mouth and continues to stand today, restored and preserved by the state park system.
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Hudson, a small Gulf settlement north of Anclote named for the Hudson family of pioneer settlers, grew up in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a fishing and turpentine outpost. So too did Aripeka in the far northwest, named for the unconquered Seminole chief. The community of Port Richey took its name from Aaron McLaughlin Richey, an Ohio native who had tried his luck in the California gold fields before settling along the Pithlachascotee River in 1883. Richey established a post office bearing his name, named a schooner he had built at Cedar Key “Port Richey” for its home port, and gave the place its enduring identity. Across the river, on the southern bank, was a small farming and ranching settlement known variously as Hickory Hammock and Hopeville. In time these residents would borrow the prestigious name of their neighbor to call themselves “New” Port Richey.
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These coastal villages remained sleepy through the 1890s and the first two decades of the twentieth century. Travel into them was difficult; the only practical access was by water or along sandy wagon trails through the pine flatwoods. They subsisted on fishing, sponge gathering, naval stores, small-scale lumbering, and a little subsistence farming on whatever upland could be cleared. Their isolation, paradoxically, would soon prove their greatest asset.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ZEPHYRHILLS COLONY AND THE NEW CENTURY
The first decade of the twentieth century brought to Pasco County a remarkable second wave of planned colonization, this time driven by Northern Civil War veterans rather than Catholic immigrants. The setting was a small farming community in the southeastern corner of the county. Originally known as Abbott, the settlement had been platted on April 18, 1888, on 280.74 acres of pine flatwoods. A voting district was established at Abbott in 1893 and a post office in 1896. The little village had a railroad stop on the line running from Sanford to Tampa, a general store, and a school, but otherwise remained an undistinguished crossroads.
In 1909 a man named Captain Howard B. Jeffries — a Civil War Union veteran originally from Pennsylvania — arrived to change all that. Jeffries had been pursuing land-colonization ventures in Florida for several years, and he saw in the rolling pine country around Abbott an ideal site for a planned community of fellow Union veterans. With partners Wallace Campbell and others, he purchased some 35,000 acres of land on August 6, 1909, and formed the Zephyrhills Colony Company. The company targeted members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the great fraternal organization of Union veterans, advertising aggressively in northern newspapers and magazines. Jeffries proposed to settle as many as six thousand veteran families on the rolling, well-drained sand hills of east Pasco. The name he chose for the new town — Zephyrhills — was meant to evoke the soft, gentle “zephyr” breezes he claimed blew across the property.
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The local post office adopted the new name on May 31, 1910. Construction was extraordinarily rapid. By 1911, seventy modest wood-frame cottages had been built in seventy days to house the arriving pensioners. Jeffries’s own two-story residence was completed on July 20, 1910, and a Grand Army of the Republic Hall, a school, and several stores followed in short order. A weekly newspaper, the Zephyrhills Colonist, kept the colonists informed of community news and recruited new arrivals. By 1912, the community had grown to nearly 2,000 residents. On November 17, 1914, the town was formally incorporated by a vote of 65 to 12; W. C. Sumner was elected the first mayor.
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The Zephyrhills colony left a distinctive imprint on east Pasco. Its early architecture, modest Craftsman-style cottages with deep porches and Cracker influences, can still be seen on the streets of the historic district. Its town plan, with wide boulevards radiating from a central park, reflected progressive turn-of-the-century planning ideas. Its civic culture was strongly patriotic, organized around veterans’ reunions, Memorial Day observances, and the persistent memory of the Union cause. In the 1923 census of the state, Zephyrhills was unusual among small Florida towns in having a predominantly Northern-born population. In a state where most rural communities still bore the strong stamp of antebellum Southern culture, this was a notable distinction.
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It was not, however, a utopia. Like virtually every Florida community of the early twentieth century, Zephyrhills was racially segregated. One contemporary observer reported as late as 1941 that the city operated as a “sundown town,” forbidding African Americans from living within the city limits. Like neighboring Dade City and many other Florida communities of the era, Zephyrhills enforced strict racial boundaries in its schools, public accommodations, and employment, and these patterns would not begin to break down until the civil rights era.
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In 1923 a development of long-term consequence arrived in Zephyrhills: the Krusen family of Pennsylvania purchased 13,000 acres of pine forest on credit and built a large sawmill, founding the Krusen Land and Timber Company. At peak operation, the company employed more than three hundred men and produced more than a million board feet of lumber a month. The Krusen mill became one of the largest employers in east Pasco for two decades.
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THE FLORIDA LAND BOOM IN PASCO
The 1920s brought the Florida Land Boom, the great speculative bubble in real estate that swept the state. The boom was driven by the rise of the automobile, by mass-circulation national advertising, by the new prosperity of the postwar northern middle class, and by aggressive promotion of Florida as a warm-weather paradise. While the greatest excesses of the boom played out in Miami and along the southeast Atlantic coast, west-central Florida had its full share of speculation.
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In Pasco County, the boom’s most spectacular manifestation was the meteoric rise of New Port Richey. The community had crystallized around the old Hickory Hammock settlement south of the Pithlachascotee River and just inland from Port Richey. By the early 1910s, it had a few stores, a small hotel, and a growing reputation as a pleasant winter retreat. In 1911 a Cleveland businessman named Elroy M. Avery, a former Civil War officer, professor, and author of a popular textbook history of the United States, established a winter home along the Pithlachascotee. Avery’s wealth and connections drew other northern visitors. He compiled and edited The Genesis of New Port Richey, the founding pamphlet history of the community, published in 1924.
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Real estate developers like George R. Sims of Great Neck, New York, arrived in 1922 and 1923. Sims donated land for what became Sims Park, originally known as Enchantment Park, along the river. His wife Marjorie became the first queen of the new Chasco Fiesta in 1922 — an annual festival concocted around an entirely fictional legend of a Calusa princess named Chasco and her romance with a Spanish captain, set forth in florid verse in a pamphlet titled Chasco, Queen of the Calusas (1922) by one Gerben M. DeVries. The “Legend of Chasco” had no basis whatever in Native American history, but it provided a colorful pretext for an annual water carnival and parade that would, despite later controversies over its appropriation of Indigenous imagery, continue in modified form into the twenty-first century.
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The dream of the New Port Richey boosters in the 1920s was nothing less than to make their city the “Hollywood of the South.” A small but very real cluster of celebrities was drawn to the Pithlachascotee River. The silent-screen actor Thomas Meighan, an Irish-Catholic from Pittsburgh whose career had been launched by Cecil B. DeMille, became a regular winter resident. He bought a home, entertained extravagantly, and attempted to recruit other film figures to the city, including his collaborator Gloria Swanson, who briefly considered a Pasco County investment. Meighan’s bungalow on the river became a local landmark. Among other prominent visitors and seasonal residents were the great professional golfer Gene Sarazen, the actor Ed Wynn, and various lesser figures of the New York stage. New Port Richey was formally incorporated on October 4, 1924; Port Richey followed in 1925. The Hacienda Hotel, completed during the boom, became the largest hostelry north of Tampa Bay along the Gulf, with formal gardens, river frontage, and a restaurant that drew patrons by automobile from St. Petersburg and Tampa.
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The land boom ended with savage suddenness in 1926. A combination of state efforts to curb speculative trading, a railroad embargo on inbound freight that crippled construction, a national tightening of credit, and finally the devastating Miami hurricane of September 1926, which killed several hundred people and destroyed thousands of buildings, took the air out of the speculative market. The crash was followed in 1928 by another hurricane that devastated the Lake Okeechobee region, by a fresh freeze in 1927, and at the end of the decade by the onset of the Great Depression. The dream of New Port Richey as the Hollywood of the South died with the boom; Hollywood remained in California, and the silent-film stars receded. But the city itself survived. Many of the beautiful boom-era buildings of downtown still stand along Main Street, restored in recent decades. The Hacienda Hotel, after decades of decline, has been the subject of repeated preservation efforts.
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PROHIBITION, MOONSHINE, AND HARD TIMES
The 1920s in Pasco County were marked, as they were across the rural South, by an active culture of moonshining and bootlegging. The combination of dense pinewoods, abundant freshwater, and the cheap availability of cane sugar and corn made the region a natural home for the illicit liquor trade. Moonshine stills hidden in palmetto thickets along the coast and the Withlacoochee River were a constant frustration to federal and state authorities. The Aripeka Inn was raided by Prohibition agents in 1931 in an episode that made the Tampa newspapers. Local lore — never quite verified — held that the Chicago gangster Al Capone himself hunted at the Moon Lake Dude Ranch in central Pasco when it opened in 1937; whether or not Capone ever set foot there, the suggestion that he might have was good for the resort’s publicity.
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The Depression years were difficult throughout the county. Citrus and vegetable prices collapsed. The Krusen sawmill at Zephyrhills, after producing prodigious quantities of lumber through the 1920s, was forced to scale back operations. The land-boom subdivisions of west Pasco lay half-built and largely empty. New Port Richey’s hopes of becoming a Hollywood of the South were definitively dead, and many of its boom-era boosters were ruined. The federal New Deal brought some relief: Civilian Conservation Corps camps were established at several Pasco sites, with crews working on flood control, road improvements, and reforestation; Works Progress Administration projects funded the construction of schools, courthouses, and other public buildings, including the Zephyrhills Municipal Airport, which would prove fateful in the next decade.
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By the mid-1930s, Pasco County’s population had grown to about 13,000, well above its 1890 level of about 4,000, but the growth had been slower than that of most coastal Florida counties. Pasco was still very much a rural place: cattle pastures, citrus groves on the higher ground, pine forests being slowly worked over by turpentine and lumber crews, and an archipelago of small towns connected by sandy roads. Most residents still farmed, fished, raised cattle, or worked in the woods. Electricity had reached the larger towns but not most rural homes. Indoor plumbing was a city luxury. The county had three small newspapers — at Dade City, Zephyrhills, and New Port Richey — and a courthouse, two railroads, several dozen one-room schools, and a single hospital.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WORLD WARS AND THEIR LEGACY
The First World War touched Pasco County in modest but real ways. Several hundred Pasco men were drafted into the Army or volunteered for service in the Navy, and a number served on the Western Front. Casualty lists were short relative to those of the great industrial cities of the North, but every town in the county had its small monument to the dead, and the experience of returning soldiers, broader in horizon than their pre-war lives had been, accelerated the slow modernization of rural Florida. More important locally was the wartime demand for naval stores: turpentine, pitch, and pine tar were essential supplies for the Navy and merchant marine, and the demand boosted prices and employment in the great pine forests of central Pasco.
The Second World War was different in scale and consequence. From late 1941 forward, every aspect of Pasco County life was reshaped by the war. Thousands of young men and women from the county served in every theater of the conflict. The federal government invested vast sums in military training facilities across Florida, taking advantage of the state’s warm climate, flat terrain, and proximity to both oceans for year-round training operations.
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ZEPHYRHILLS ARMY AIRFIELD
The largest single wartime federal investment in Pasco County was Zephyrhills Army Airfield. The site had been the small Zephyrhills municipal airport, a Works Progress Administration project, when the United States Army Air Corps began a major expansion in 1941. By 1943 the airfield was in full operation as an advanced training base for fighter pilots. In 1942 the Army established at Zephyrhills the 10th Fighter Squadron, which was fully organized the following year. Between January 1943 and March 1944, nearly five hundred Army Air Forces pilots received training at the field in air-defense tactics and in the operation of front-line fighters: the P-38 Lightning, the P-40 Warhawk, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang. The 10th Fighter Squadron went on to fly missions over Normandy during Operation Overlord, the great Allied invasion of Europe in June 1944. After the war, the airfield was transferred to civilian municipal service, with the former military buildings put to use as residences, schools, medical offices, and Civil Air Patrol facilities. The Zephyrhills Municipal Airport that occupies the site today became, in later decades, internationally famous as a center for sport parachuting and home to world-renowned skydiving facilities.
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A second, lesser-known military facility was the Withlacoochee Army Airfield and Bombing & Gunnery Range, built around 1942 in the wild country east of Lacoochee. The auxiliary base supported gunnery training out of Bushnell and Zephyrhills. It was abandoned in 1945, and most of its infrastructure has long since disappeared into the regrowing pinewoods. Other military facilities indirectly served the area: nearby Bushnell Army Airfield, MacDill Field at Tampa, and the great Drew Field that would become Tampa International Airport.
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THE DADE CITY PRISONER OF WAR CAMP
In 1944, an unusual federal facility was established at Dade City: a prisoner of war camp for German soldiers, designated Branch Camp No. 7 under the headquarters at Camp Blanding near Starke. The labor shortage created by mass military mobilization had crippled Florida’s agricultural and forestry industries, and the federal Prisoner of War Special Projects Division had established roughly five hundred camps nationwide to alleviate it. Florida hosted twenty-two such camps, all administered from Camp Blanding. The Dade City camp opened operations in March 1944. It housed an average of 250 men, many of them veterans of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps captured in North Africa in 1942–43. American officials had carefully sorted the prisoners before assignment: committed Nazi Party members were sent to other camps, while “anti-Nazi” prisoners were directed to facilities like Dade City where they would interact with civilians.
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The prisoners were paid local prevailing wages for their labor, though all but a small daily allowance of personal cash went to the United States government. They worked at the Pasco Packing Association in Dade City, the Cummer Sons Cypress Company sawmill at Lacoochee, and the McDonald Mine at Brooksville, where they made bricks used to construct buildings at the Pasco Packing facility. Many had substantial contact with local residents. Religious services were conducted by a Lutheran minister from Tampa and by Catholic priests from Saint Leo Abbey. The camp was designed with a three-tent mess hall that doubled as a chapel, schoolroom, and movie theater; a canteen; day rooms with table tennis and a piano; and sleeping quarters in tents and prefabricated barracks.
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The Dade City camp closed in 1946 when the prisoners were repatriated to Germany. Many of the former prisoners maintained correspondence with their American hosts for decades, and a few returned over the years for nostalgic visits, including to attend reunions organized by local historical societies. In 1995, the Pasco County Board of County Commissioners and the county historical preservation committee erected a marker at the site of the camp, now Naomi Jones Pyracantha Park on what is today Martin Luther King Boulevard. The episode is one of the more remarkable chapters in Pasco County’s twentieth-century history, and it remains an unexpectedly warm memory in a global conflict otherwise marked by horror.
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CHAPTER NINE
TRILBY, LACOOCHEE, AND BLACK PASCO
To tell the history of Pasco County honestly requires attention to the experience of its African American citizens, an experience too often passed over in older county histories. Black settlement in what is now Pasco County dates from the pioneer era, when enslaved laborers worked alongside their owners in the cattle and turpentine economy of southern Hernando. After emancipation in 1865, freedmen and freedwomen remained in the area in considerable numbers, working as tenant farmers, turpentine workers, lumbermen, and domestic servants. The earliest Black communities tended to cluster near larger plantations and around the new railroad towns where labor was needed.
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The first school for Black children in what would become Pasco County was probably the Hernando Colored School, established near the present site of Trilby in the years after the war. Its precise location has been lost, but it is documented in early school-board records. From the 1880s onward, Pasco’s school system was rigidly segregated by race, as required by Florida law, with separate buildings, separate funding (usually far less generous for the Black schools), and separate teaching staffs. This pattern persisted until the gradual desegregation that began in the late 1960s.
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THE CUMMER MILL AT LACOOCHEE
The most consequential single development for Black Pasco in the first half of the twentieth century was the establishment of the Cummer Sons Cypress Company mill at Lacoochee in 1922. The Cummer family had operated a cypress mill at Sumner, a logging town in Levy County, in close proximity to the small Black community of Rosewood. In January 1923, Rosewood was the scene of one of the most horrific racial massacres in American history, in which a white mob from neighboring Sumner, acting on false accusations against a Black resident, killed multiple Black residents and destroyed the town. The exact death toll has never been fully established. In 1926, fire destroyed the Cummer mill at Sumner, and by 1927 the Cummer company had relocated the operation to
a new site on the Withlacoochee River at Lacoochee in Pasco County, where vast tracts of old-growth cypress remained untouched. Many of the Black families who had worked at the Sumner mill — survivors and witnesses of the Rosewood massacre — moved with the company to Lacoochee. They established a Black community in Lacoochee proper that would grow to a population of several hundred, served by Black-owned stores, churches, and a school. Trilby, just south of Lacoochee on the rail line, also developed a significant Black population, with the Trilby Cemetery (also called the “Trilby Colored Cemetery”) serving as a burial ground for both communities. Today the cemetery contains graves dating back to 1883.
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The Cummer mill at Lacoochee was, at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, one of the largest cypress mills in the southeastern United States. Its great log ponds, its high overhead trams, and its smoking sawmills employed hundreds of workers, both Black and white, in segregated jobs. The company maintained a commissary, employee housing, and other facilities typical of the Southern mill-town pattern. Cypress harvested from a vast hinterland — eventually including the upper reaches of the Everglades — passed through the Lacoochee mill. The community generated a vibrant culture: O’Quinn and Brabham’s general stores, Abraham’s drugstore, Tommy’s pool room, Vivian’s movie theater, a thriving baseball park where the Lacoochee Nine drew crowds, and Morgan’s Ford across the Withlacoochee.
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By the early 1950s the cypress resource was largely exhausted, and in 1959 Cummer Sons closed the mill. The economic blow to Lacoochee and Trilby was devastating. Hundreds of jobs were lost; many families moved away to Tampa, Orlando, or further north in search of work. The Lacoochee that remained slowly reverted toward a quieter rural existence, but it retained — and retains today — a strong sense of historical identity. Subsequent decades have seen the construction of a community center, the founding of nonprofit organizations like the Greater Trilby Community Association, and various community-driven efforts at economic revitalization.
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LYNCHING, JIM CROW, AND THE SLOW STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY
The history of Black Pasco includes the violence of the Jim Crow era. The Trilby Cemetery records the burial of Will Leak, a Black man accused of attempted rape and killed by a lynch mob at the cemetery itself on August 6, 1915. Other Black Pasco residents died at the hands of law enforcement under murky circumstances, including George Lark, shot and killed by a Pasco County sheriff’s deputy in December 1925. These episodes were not unusual for the rural South of the period, and Pasco was not in this respect distinguishable from neighboring counties. They are nonetheless central to an honest account of the county’s past.
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Segregation in Pasco’s schools, as elsewhere in the South, persisted through and beyond the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The county did not begin meaningful desegregation until the mid-1960s, and complete integration of the public schools did not occur until the early 1970s, under federal court pressure. The first Black graduates of the formerly white public schools in the county faced significant resistance, but the integration proceeded more smoothly here than in some neighboring jurisdictions. By the mid-1970s, school integration was a settled fact in Pasco County, although the consequences for the historic Black schools — many of which were closed — were mixed at best.
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Public accommodations and employment patterns desegregated more gradually. The Pasco Packing Association, the great citrus packing operation in Dade City that had employed prisoners of war during World War II and Black workers for decades thereafter, continued to operate with substantial Black employment into the 1980s. Pioneer Florida Museum and Village, established at Dade City in 1975, eventually incorporated exhibits on Black pioneer life. The Black communities of Dade City, Trilby, Lacoochee, and Trilacoochee in the northeast retained their distinctive identity through the period of integration. They produced a number of distinguished citizens, including educators, ministers, and civic leaders, who contributed to the wider life of the county.
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The most prominent neighborhoods of historically Black Pasco today include the Mickens-Harper neighborhood of Dade City, named for the prominent Mickens and Harper families; sections of Lacoochee and Trilby; and the small Black community of New Port Richey along the lower Pithlachascotee. Throughout these communities, churches — particularly African Methodist Episcopal, Missionary Baptist, and Pentecostal congregations — have played a central role in social and political life. The same is true of the role of historically Black higher educational institutions in shaping the lives of Pasco’s Black citizens: a remarkable number of mid-twentieth-century Black Pascoans attended Bethune-Cookman, Florida A&M, Edward Waters, or other historically Black colleges before returning home to teach, preach, or operate businesses.
CHAPTER TEN
THE POSTWAR BOOM ON THE GULF COAST
The Second World War transformed Florida. Servicemen who had passed through the state during training returned in great numbers after their discharge, often bringing their families with them. The 1940s and 1950s saw a sustained population growth in Florida that would eventually be felt in every county, and that in many places became a true explosion. Pasco County was at the center of this transformation, though the pattern of its growth was distinctive.
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For the first fifty years of its existence, Pasco’s center of population had been firmly in the east, along the railroads and the Fort King Road in the rolling pine hills around Dade City, Zephyrhills, San Antonio, and St. Leo. The west, with its mosquito-ridden coastal plain, its lack of road and rail infrastructure, and its uneven soils, had been thinly populated. After 1945, this pattern began to reverse. The new factors at work were the automobile, the air conditioner, the federal interstate highway program, and an extraordinary national appetite for affordable warm-weather retirement.
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THE COMING OF THE RETIREES
The first major postwar phenomenon was the development of large retirement-oriented subdivisions along the Pasco Gulf coast. Several large planned communities took shape in the 1950s and 1960s along the west side of U.S. Highway 19, the main north-south coastal artery, which had been substantially upgraded after the war. Coastal “fishing villages” — particularly Hudson, Bayonet Point, Beacon Square, Holiday, Elfers, Embassy Hills, and Jasmin Estates — were transformed by aggressive developers who blasted canal networks into the low limestone bedrock, dredged spoil into building pads, and built modest concrete-block homes priced for retirees on fixed incomes. The canals at Hudson Beach were largely blasted out by Army Corps of Engineers contractors in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, producing a labyrinth of waterways with single-family homes lining their banks.
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The community of Holiday took its name from a Holiday Drive that had been platted in southwestern Pasco in the early 1960s. William W. Boyd, president of First Federal Savings and Loan of nearby Tarpon Springs, proposed naming a new branch office “Holiday” after the road, and the larger community gradually adopted the appealing name. Holiday became one of the largest unincorporated communities in the county, eventually exceeding 20,000 residents.
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The vast development that filled in the Pasco Gulf coast in the 1950s and 1960s was the work of developers including Gulf Coast Development Corporation, the Mackle Brothers’ General Development Corporation, U.S. Steel Corporation through its real estate subsidiaries, and many smaller firms. Their lots were marketed nationally — sometimes through deceptively glossy brochures that obscured the soggy reality of the actual sites — and sold in many cases sight unseen to retirees in Ohio, Michigan, New York, and the upper Midwest. These buyers retired to Pasco in the 1960s and 1970s, generally drawing pensions or Social Security and contributing little to the local labor market except as consumers. They created a powerful new political and demographic constituency in west Pasco that would, for several decades, dominate county politics and reshape its government.
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POPULATION GROWTH AT WARP SPEED
The numbers tell the story of mid-century Pasco like nothing else. In 1950 the county counted 20,529 residents. In 1960 the figure was 36,785, an annual rate of growth of 6.0 percent. In 1970 the county had 75,955 residents, an annual growth rate of 7.5 percent. In 1980 Pasco had 193,661 residents, an annual growth rate of 9.8 percent — the highest in county history. The 1970s alone saw a near-tripling of population, driven almost entirely by retirement migration to the Gulf coast. By 1990 Pasco had 281,131 residents; by 2000, 344,765; by 2010, 464,697; by 2020, 561,891. Pasco County, which had been an obscure rural agricultural county in the era of the Great Depression, had become one of the most populous counties in Florida.
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The new retirees were overwhelmingly elderly. Beginning around 1970, the median age of Pasco residents was among the highest of any county in Florida — at one point in the 1980s it exceeded sixty years, making Pasco one of the oldest counties in the United States. This had profound consequences for the county’s economy, politics, and social life. The retiree population voted in extraordinarily high proportions; they wanted low property taxes, modest government services, predictable change. Many were Northern-born transplants with no historical roots in the county, and they had little patience for what they saw as the old-fashioned, Southern, agricultural culture of east Pasco. The political balance of the county shifted from east to west, and tensions between east and west Pasco became a recurring theme of county politics for at least the next thirty years.
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EAST-WEST TENSIONS AND THE TWO-CENTER COMPROMISE
As west Pasco’s population came to exceed east Pasco’s in the 1970s, demands grew from the western side for greater political representation and even for the creation of a new county. Some western activists argued that Dade City was too remote from west Pasco, that government services were inadequate for the new population centers around New Port Richey and Holiday, and that an independent “West Pasco County” should be carved out. The proposal had real political force but was ultimately rejected — Florida’s legislature has consistently been reluctant to create new counties in recent decades. In its place, the county commission and legislature adopted a “two-center” compromise: the historic county courthouse and seat at Dade City would be retained, but a second government center would be established in the west, at New Port Richey. The West Pasco Government Center opened in the late 1970s and provided most county services for west Pasco residents close to home. To this day, Pasco County operates as effectively a bicephalous government, with key offices duplicated at Dade City and New Port Richey.
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The decision to retain the courthouse at Dade City, despite the population shift westward, helped to preserve the historic character of east Pasco. Dade City avoided the wholesale destruction of its downtown that afflicted so many small American county seats in the era of strip development. The 1909 courthouse, the historic main street, and the surrounding residential neighborhoods of Victorian and early-twentieth-century homes have been substantially preserved. Today Dade City presents one of the most attractive historic downtowns in west-central Florida, with antique stores, restaurants, and the venerable Pioneer Florida Museum and Village just outside the city limits.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE END OF AGRICULTURAL PASCO
For the first ninety years of its existence, Pasco County had been an agricultural place. Cattle, citrus, vegetables, pine lumber, and turpentine had been the foundations of its economy. As late as 1970, the county still had thousands of acres in active groves, dozens of cattle ranches and dairies, and a handful of working sawmills. By the year 2000, all of this had largely changed.
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The decline of Florida citrus, well underway since the freezes of the 1980s, had reduced the once-extensive Pasco groves to scattered remnants. The savage freezes of January 1977, December 1983, and December 1989 — the last of these driving temperatures into the teens across much of Pasco — successively damaged the surviving groves to a degree from which most never recovered. The citrus belt of Florida retreated still further south, into Polk, Hardee, Highlands, and DeSoto counties. By the 1990s, the great Pasco Packing Association in Dade City, once one of the largest citrus packing operations in the state, had ceased operations. The slow, sad disappearance of east Pasco’s citrus economy is recorded in the abandoned packinghouses, gradually reabsorbed by the surrounding suburbs and forests, that remain visible on aerial photographs of the region.
Citrus disease — particularly citrus greening, which arrived in Florida in 2005 — has continued to depress what little of the industry remained. A handful of dedicated growers continue to operate, particularly in the kumquat sector. The Kumquat Festival of Dade City, held annually on the last weekend of January since 1998, draws tens of thousands of visitors and showcases the small but determined remnant of the Pasco citrus industry. Local kumquat marmalades, pies, salsas, and other products are sold at the festival and at farm stands around the county.
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The cattle business has fared somewhat better. Several great Pasco cattle ranches survived into the twenty-first century, including the celebrated Starkey Ranch, the Bexley Ranch, the Cone Ranch, and the Lykes Bros. holdings. But here too the pressure of development has been immense. Each of the great ranches has, in the past thirty years, sold portions of its land for residential or commercial development; some have been entirely converted to other uses. The Starkey family, whose patriarch Jay B. Starkey, Sr. began acquiring land in central Pasco in the 1930s, eventually donated several thousand acres of their holdings to the Southwest Florida Water Management District for what became the Jay B. Starkey Wilderness Park and Preserve. The preservation of this great tract, which contains some of the finest remaining longleaf pine and cypress habitat in central Florida, is among the most important land-conservation achievements in Pasco’s history. The Starkey family later sold additional acreage for the master-planned Starkey Ranch community, which has become one of the most successful new communities of recent years.
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The pine forests have been largely cut or converted to faster-growing plantations. The great turpentine industry, which had employed hundreds of Pasco residents through the 1930s and 1940s, was essentially gone by the 1960s, undercut by petroleum-based substitutes and by the conversion of pine lands to pulpwood production. The cypress that had supported the Lacoochee mill was long since cut, and the Withlacoochee River, once choked with log rafts, now flows clear and quiet through state forests.
In its place came suburbia.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEW PASCO: SUBURB OF TAMPA BAY
The first half of the postwar growth in Pasco, from 1945 through about 1980, was driven principally by retirement migration to the Gulf coast. The second half, from roughly 1980 to the present, has been driven by the explosive growth of the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, of which Pasco has become an integral part.
Several factors made Pasco a logical destination for suburban expansion from Tampa. First was geography: Pasco sits immediately north of Hillsborough County, with the line between the two cutting across what had been thinly populated agricultural country and accessible by major highways. Second was the cost of land: cattle ranches and old groves could be purchased at fractions of urban Tampa prices. Third was the construction of new highways, especially the extension of Interstate 75 northward through eastern Hillsborough into Pasco in the 1970s, and the Suncoast Parkway (State Road 589), a tolled limited-access expressway that opened in segments between 2001 and 2022. The Suncoast Parkway, running north from the Veterans Expressway in Hillsborough through central Pasco and on into Hernando, Citrus, and ultimately the Big Bend, opened vast tracts of central Pasco to suburban development for the first time. Fourth was the maturation of regional water and sewer infrastructure, particularly through the Southwest Florida Water Management District (the “Swiftmud”) and Tampa Bay Water, which made large-scale development on previously rural land technically feasible.
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The result was a generation of master-planned communities that, between roughly 1990 and the present, have transformed central and southern Pasco. The first major project was Saddlebrook Resort, opened in 1980 as a golf-and-tennis resort and residential community in the unincorporated Wesley Chapel area. Saddlebrook hosted professional tennis tournaments featuring the leading players of the era and brought a degree of international attention to a previously obscure rural crossroads.
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Meadow Pointe, developed by the Crescent Resources unit of Duke Energy, broke ground in 1992 and was one of the first large traditional master-planned communities in the county. Wiregrass Ranch followed at the end of the 1990s, developed by the Porter family on land they had owned for generations, and grew into a substantial community of some 5,000 acres anchored by the Shops at Wiregrass open-air shopping center, the Wiregrass Ranch High School, the Pasco-Hernando State College Porter Campus, and major hospital facilities. The Shops at Wiregrass opened in 2008 as the new commercial heart of central Pasco. Just to its west, the Tampa Premium Outlets opened in 2015 along Interstate 75. Connerton, a community of more than 8,000 planned units in central Pasco, also broke ground in this era. Bexley, on the former Bexley Ranch property along the Suncoast Parkway, opened in 2016. Other major projects of recent years include Starkey Ranch, on the great former cattle ranch in southwest Pasco; Asturia in Odessa; Epperson, with its celebrated central artificial lagoon; Mirada, in San Antonio, also with a great lagoon; and the immense Angeline development on more than 6,000 acres in central Pasco.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF WESLEY CHAPEL
No part of Pasco County has been more thoroughly remade by recent development than the area centered on Wesley Chapel. Through the entire twentieth century, Wesley Chapel had been a small rural community of pine flatwoods and pastures. Its name, derived from the Methodist meeting house at the corner of what is now State Road 54 and Boyette Road, had been in local use since at least the 1870s. The community sat astride State Road 54, the principal east-west road between Pasco’s eastern and central areas, and just north of the Pasco-Hillsborough line. Its rural character persisted through the 1970s and 1980s.
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The transformation began in earnest in the late 1990s as the growth of Tampa pushed north along Interstate 75 and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard (State Road 581). The opening of Saddlebrook in 1980, and of the Meadow Pointe community in 1992, had been early harbingers. By the early 2000s, Wesley Chapel had become the growth engine of Pasco County. The Shops at Wiregrass opened in 2008. Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel — later renamed AdventHealth Wesley Chapel — opened a $150 million hospital and wellness center in 2012. In 2019, AdventHealth substantially expanded the facility, adding a Moffitt Cancer Center location. Tampa Premium Outlets opened in 2015 just west of I-75, technically in Land O’ Lakes/Lutz. New schools, restaurants, and residential subdivisions came online by the dozen.
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By the early 2020s, Wesley Chapel had become an unincorporated census-designated place of more than 65,000 residents — more populous than any incorporated city in the county — and one of the fastest-growing communities in the entire United States. Its sleek commercial corridors, its master-planned residential subdivisions, and its expanding healthcare and educational institutions bear little resemblance to the rural community of even thirty years earlier. The new Wesley Chapel has attracted a young, ethnically diverse population — including significant Indian, Asian, Latino, and African American communities — that contrasts sharply with the older, whiter retirement-driven west Pasco. Plans for Two Rivers, a planned community of more than 7,500 homes east of Wesley Chapel, signal continued eastward expansion of suburban development, eventually meeting the existing fringe of Zephyrhills.
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LAND O' LAKES, TRINITY, AND THE OTHER SUBURBAN CENTERS
The community of Land O’ Lakes acquired its modern name in 1949 when residents of the Drexel-Denham area, a cluster of small lakeside communities in central Pasco along the old Orange Belt right-of-way, decided to consolidate under a more marketable identity. The following year, the Ehren Post Office was moved and renamed Land O’ Lakes. Through most of the twentieth century, Land O’ Lakes remained a thinly populated area of small farms, citrus groves, and weekend fishing camps on its many small lakes. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, it became a major suburban growth area, eventually growing to a population approaching 50,000. The opening of the Suncoast Parkway in 2001, which has its first major interchange in Pasco at Land O’ Lakes, dramatically accelerated this growth.
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The Trinity area, in southwest Pasco just north of the Hillsborough county line and east of New Port Richey, was developed beginning in the late 1980s primarily as an upscale residential community anchored by the Trinity Communities developments. Trinity grew rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s; the Trinity area emerged as one of the wealthier portions of the county, with newer housing, better schools, and a substantial commercial center. Today Trinity hosts major hospital facilities, retail centers, and the planned Marketplace at Trinity commercial development.
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Odessa, in extreme southwest Pasco, was an old crossroads community on the former Orange Belt Railway that retained a rural character into the 1990s and then experienced extensive development. The Suncoast Parkway opening at SR 54 brought commercial development to the area in the early 2000s, including the Tampa Premium Outlets mall complex in 2015.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE INCORPORATED MUNICIPALITIES
Despite its rapid suburban growth, Pasco County remains a county dominated by unincorporated territory. Of its roughly 680,000 residents in 2025, more than 90 percent live in unincorporated communities. The six incorporated municipalities — Dade City, Zephyrhills, San Antonio, St. Leo, Port Richey, and New Port Richey — together account for fewer than 60,000 residents. This unusual political geography is the consequence of Florida’s traditionally weak municipal annexation powers and of the strong tradition of unincorporated suburban development that has characterized the state since World War II.
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Dade City, the county seat and third-largest incorporated city, had a 2020 population of 7,275. The historic downtown, centered on the 1909 courthouse, hosts the annual Kumquat Festival in late January and various other community events. Its restored downtown buildings house antique stores, restaurants, breweries, and small specialty shops. The Hugh Embry Library, founded in 1904 by a young man recovering from illness who wanted to share books, is one of the oldest public libraries in west-central Florida. The Pioneer Florida Museum and Village, established in 1975 just outside the city limits, preserves a collection of historic buildings including the 1864 Bertha Maud House, a small church, a one-room schoolhouse, an old train depot from Trilby, a 1913 locomotive, and various agricultural buildings. The museum’s annual Pioneer Florida Day on Labor Day has become a major regional event.
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Zephyrhills, with a 2020 population of 17,522 and a 2025 population approaching 24,000, is by a substantial margin the largest incorporated city in Pasco County. The city remains known as the “City of Pure Water” for its long-running connection to the Zephyrhills Spring Water Company, originally founded in 1964 to bottle and sell water from one of the city’s spring sources. The Zephyrhills brand was acquired by Nestlé Waters in 1987 and is today produced by BlueTriton Brands. The historic district along Fifth Avenue, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001, preserves dozens of Civil War colony–era buildings. The Zephyrhills Municipal Airport, the former World War II military airfield, is the centerpiece of a substantial sport-parachuting industry; Skydive City at Zephyrhills is one of the world’s premier civilian skydiving operations, hosting national and international parachuting competitions and drawing skydivers from around the world. The Zephyrhills Museum of Military History, founded in 2001 in a renovated wartime infantry barracks at the airport, preserves the local memory of military service.
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San Antonio, the original Catholic colony town founded by Edmund Dunne, retains a strong sense of its historic character. The population of about 1,350 is concentrated around the historic town circle plaza, the centerpiece of Dunne’s original plan. St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, dedicated in 1911, remains the oldest Catholic church building in the county. San Antonio is the home of the annual Rattlesnake Festival, originally a fundraiser by the local volunteer fire department and now one of the larger community events in the county. The town has grown modestly with the development of nearby Mirada and other master-planned communities, but it has worked to preserve its small-town character.
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St. Leo, immediately east of San Antonio, has a population of roughly 1,400, of which a substantial proportion are connected to Saint Leo University. The town occupies 858 acres along the southern shore of Lake Jovita and was formally incorporated on June 4, 1891, making it the oldest incorporated municipality in Pasco County. Saint Leo Abbey, the Benedictine monastery founded in 1889, remains a working community of monks and serves as the spiritual heart of the town. The Abbey Church, the Abbey golf course, and the surrounding grounds are open to visitors. Saint Leo University, the modern descendant of Saint Leo College, has roughly 2,000 traditional undergraduates on its main campus and a much larger online and distance-learning enrollment that has made it one of the largest Catholic universities in the country.
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Port Richey, the smaller of the two New Port Richey-area cities, was incorporated in 1925 and had a 2020 population of roughly 3,000. Its small size and concentration of older housing have given it a sometimes uneasy relationship with neighboring New Port Richey, but it has retained a distinct identity centered on its Gulf coast and the lower Pithlachascotee. The waterfront is dominated by older marinas, modest fishing-village commercial development, and increasingly by upscale homes built on canals and waterfront lots.
New Port Richey, incorporated in 1924 and now the second-largest incorporated city in Pasco County with a 2020 population of 16,728, has experienced a dramatic downtown revitalization since the early 2000s. After decades of decline following the bursting of the 1920s land boom, the city saw renewed investment beginning around 2010 in its Main Street historic district along the Pithlachascotee. Restaurants, breweries, shops, and an active arts scene have grown up along the river and around Sims Park. The Hacienda Hotel, the great boom-era hostelry that had stood empty for decades, has been the focus of repeated preservation and redevelopment efforts. The annual Chasco Fiesta — much modified since the 1980s in response to concerns about its cultural appropriation of Indigenous imagery — continues as a multi-day community festival each March, blending Native American heritage observance with carnival rides, concerts, and street fairs.
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ECONOMY, HEALTH CARE, AND THE NEW PASCO
The Pasco economy has been transformed by suburbanization at least as dramatically as its demographics. The historic foundation of cattle, citrus, lumber, and tourism has been replaced by a mixed-services economy centered on healthcare, education, retail, construction, distribution and logistics, and increasingly the life sciences. As of 2024, the county supported roughly 275,000 employed residents, a number that grew by more than 5 percent in a single year.
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HEALTH CARE: THE GROWTH INDUSTRY OF MODERN PASCO
The largest single sector of the modern Pasco economy is healthcare. The combination of an aging population, the rapid growth of the working-age population, and the convenient location of Pasco between the Tampa medical complex and the retirement communities of the Nature Coast has made healthcare an enormous and growing industry. Major employers include AdventHealth (with hospitals at Wesley Chapel, Dade City, and Zephyrhills, plus extensive outpatient services); HCA Florida (with hospitals at Trinity and Bayonet Point); BayCare Health System (with multiple facilities and a major regional distribution center in Pasco); Orlando Health (with a new 300-bed hospital under construction near Wiregrass Ranch as of the mid-2020s); and Moffitt Cancer Center, whose extensive Pasco operations were announced in 2018 and are taking shape around the Suncoast Parkway corridor in central Pasco.
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The arrival of Moffitt Cancer Center, an internationally renowned cancer research and treatment institution, has been one of the most significant economic announcements in Pasco’s modern history. Moffitt’s planned Speros FL campus, also called the Pasco Innovation District, encompasses 775 acres of former ranch land near the future intersection of the Suncoast Parkway and the planned Ridge Road extension. The development, partnered with Lennar Corporation and Metro Development Group, is expected to eventually include some 16 million square feet of research lab, light industrial, manufacturing, general office, and clinical building space. The first phase, the W. E. Simpson Concourse for Cures, broke ground in 2023. A Moffitt-owned clinic with a state-of-the-art proton therapy center is scheduled to open in early 2026, with the Moffitt Discovery and Innovation Center to follow later in the year. The development is anticipated to generate thousands of high-paying jobs and to transform Pasco’s economic profile from a primarily residential and retail-oriented county to a regional center of biomedical research and innovation.
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OTHER GROWTH SECTORS
Distribution and logistics have emerged as a major growth sector, particularly along the Suncoast Parkway and Interstate 75 corridors. BayCare Health System operates a large distribution center serving its healthcare network. Major retailers, including Amazon (with a substantial fulfillment center), have established Pasco operations. Tourism and hospitality, long anchored by sport fishing, golf, and the spring training operations of major league baseball teams in surrounding counties, has expanded with the opening of major destination facilities including the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus, designed to attract regional and national sports tournaments and drawing some 800,000 visitors annually at full operation.
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Education has grown substantially as both an employer and an economic driver. Pasco County Schools, with more than 80,000 students in the mid-2020s, is the single largest employer in the county. Saint Leo University, Pasco-Hernando State College, and various private and charter schools account for many additional educational positions. The Pasco-Hernando State College Porter Campus at Wiregrass Ranch, completed in 2012, has been particularly successful.
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Construction and real estate, perhaps inevitably given the rate of population growth, are major sectors. Some 21 percent of the county’s housing stock was built between 2000 and 2009, and nearly 12 percent between 2010 and 2019. Construction continues at a strong pace through the mid-2020s.
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THE OLD AGRICULTURE PERSISTS
Despite the dramatic transformations, traces of the older agricultural Pasco persist. Some 800,000 head of cattle still graze on Florida ranches, and a substantial number of these are in Pasco. Citrus, blueberries, strawberries, and various specialty crops continue to be grown by a small number of producers. The annual Pasco County Fair, held in Dade City each February, preserves the traditions of an agricultural county. The Florida State Cup youth soccer tournament and the Florida Strawberry Festival in nearby Plant City draw Pasco participants and audiences. The Pasco-Hernando Cattlemen’s Association remains active, organizing rodeos and youth livestock events. The Pioneer Florida Museum continues to host an annual Pioneer Florida Day on Labor Day weekend, preserving the historic memory of the agricultural era.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ENVIRONMENT, CONSERVATION, AND THE LAND ITSELF
For all the changes that have remade Pasco County in the past century, the underlying landscape continues to assert itself. The Gulf coast is still low and flat and prone to storm surge. The interior is still a country of sand hills, pine flatwoods, cypress strands, and sinkhole lakes. The Withlacoochee River still flows clear and dark out of the Green Swamp in Polk County and across the northeast corner of Pasco. The aquifer beneath the county still rises and falls with the rhythm of the seasons. Water — its supply, its quality, and increasingly its volume in extreme weather events — is the single most important environmental fact of Pasco County life.
Pasco occupies a critical position in the Floridan Aquifer system, the great limestone freshwater reservoir that underlies most of central and northern Florida. The high recharge area of the Green Swamp, just east of Pasco
in Polk and Sumter counties, provides much of the freshwater that flows southward through the aquifer to feed Tampa Bay. Pasco’s own well fields, particularly along the Cross Bar Ranch in central Pasco, have supplied substantial portions of Tampa Bay Water’s regional water demand for decades. The withdrawal of groundwater from these well fields, particularly during the rapid suburban growth of the 1980s and 1990s, was implicated in the drying of many Pasco lakes and the loss of cypress dome wetlands across central Pasco. Federal court rulings and Southwest Florida Water Management District actions in the 1990s ultimately required reductions in withdrawals from the Cross Bar and adjacent well fields, and groundwater levels in central Pasco have partially recovered.
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CONSERVATION LANDS
The conservation movement in Pasco County has been substantial. The Jay B. Starkey Wilderness Park and Preserve in southwest Pasco, donated in part by the Starkey family, encompasses more than 18,000 acres of pine flatwoods, cypress dome wetlands, and sandhill ridges. The Conner Preserve, the Cypress Creek Preserve, the Serenova Tract, and the Lower Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve protect additional thousands of acres. Anclote Key Preserve State Park, in the Gulf just off the New Port Richey coast, protects the historic lighthouse and offshore islands. The Withlacoochee State Forest extends into northeastern Pasco. The Anclote River Park, the Werner-Boyce Salt Springs State Park, and the Robert J. Strickland Memorial Park preserve key portions of the Pasco coastline. The Pasco County Environmental Lands Acquisition Program, established in the 2000s, has purchased additional tracts. Together, these conservation lands account for more than 100,000 acres of preserved Pasco land — a meaningful fraction of the county’s 868 square miles.
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HURRICANES AND THE GULF COAST
The greatest natural hazard facing Pasco County is the hurricane. The county’s twenty miles of low, flat Gulf coast — much of it built up with single-family homes at elevations of less than ten feet above sea level — is acutely vulnerable to storm surge. Even modest tropical systems can flood the coastal communities, particularly Holiday, Hudson, Port Richey, New Port Richey, and Aripeka, where canal networks and low-lying neighborhoods receive water rapidly during onshore winds.
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In the past three decades, Pasco has been struck or seriously affected by numerous hurricanes and tropical storms. The 2004 hurricane season was particularly severe: Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne, both of which made Atlantic-coast Florida landfall in September, brought sustained tropical-storm-force winds across Pasco. Hurricane Charley in August 2004 swept across central Florida from the southwest, with eye passage to the south of Pasco, and Hurricane Wilma in October 2005 brought further damage. The county had not, by then, experienced a true direct strike from a major hurricane in a generation, but the cumulative damage from the 2004 and 2005 seasons was substantial.
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The 2017 season brought Hurricane Irma, a powerful Category 5 storm that traversed the entire Florida peninsula. Irma weakened to a Category 3 before its passage across west-central Florida, but its broad wind field and substantial storm surge produced widespread damage in Pasco. At the time, Pasco County public safety administrator Kevin Guthrie — who would later become director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management — coordinated the local emergency response.
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The 2024 season was, by all accounts, the most damaging in Pasco County’s recorded history. Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that made landfall in the Big Bend region on September 26, passed well offshore of Pasco but generated a storm surge of historic proportions along the Pasco Gulf coast. Coastal communities including Holiday, Hudson, Bayonet Point, Aripeka, and the lower neighborhoods of New Port Richey and Port Richey saw flooding to depths of six to eight feet in low-lying areas. Thousands of homes were inundated. Less than two weeks later, on October 9, Hurricane Milton — a Category 3 storm at landfall near Siesta Key — passed eastward across central Pasco, bringing destructive winds, additional storm surge, and historic inland flooding from the heavy rainfall that accompanied the storm. The Withlacoochee River, ordinarily a quiet stream, swelled to record levels, flooding portions of Lacoochee, Trilby, and the eastern parts of Zephyrhills. East Pasco communities — including parts of Dade City and Zephyrhills that had never before flooded in living memory — saw widespread damage. County debris-removal crews removed more than 1.4 million cubic yards of debris from county roads, roughly five times the comparable post-Irma total.
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The federal government, recognizing the scale of the destruction, allocated some $585 million in Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds to Pasco County alone in late 2024 — among the largest such allocations in the county’s history. The funds, made possible in part by the advocacy of Pasco’s Congressman Gus Bilirakis, were directed toward affordable replacement housing, repairs of damaged homes, stormwater improvements, and economic assistance to affected small businesses.
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The 2024 hurricane season is widely seen as a turning point in Pasco’s relationship to its coastline. The vulnerability of much of the developed Gulf coast to storm surge and rising sea levels has been laid bare in a way that earlier storms had only suggested. Discussions about elevation requirements, buyout programs for repeatedly flooded properties, and long-term coastal adaptation have moved from the realm of academic speculation to active public policy. The county’s relationship with its twenty miles of Gulf coast — historically one of its great economic assets — is being fundamentally reconsidered.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EDUCATION, RELIGION, AND CULTURE
The history of education in Pasco County tracks closely with the broader story of the county’s development. From the thirty-seven teachers of the original county school system in 1887, Pasco County Schools has grown into the eleventh-largest school district in Florida, with more than 80,000 students enrolled across nearly a hundred elementary, middle, and high schools, charter schools, and specialty programs. The district is one of the largest employers in the county and a major political force.
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The first high school in west Pasco was Gulf High School in New Port Richey, established in 1922 as the community formally incorporated. In east Pasco, Pasco High School in Dade City and Zephyrhills High School served the older agricultural communities. After integration in the 1960s and 1970s, the system grew explosively to meet the demands of the surge in population: Wesley Chapel High School, Sunlake High School, Wiregrass Ranch High School, J. W. Mitchell High School, River Ridge High School, Cypress Creek High School, Anclote High School, and a dozen others were built to accommodate the new generations of students arriving with their families to Pasco’s master-planned communities.
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Higher education in Pasco centers on Saint Leo University, the modern descendant of the Benedictine Saint Leo College founded in 1889. Saint Leo offers more than fifty-five undergraduate and graduate degree programs, plus an extensive distance-learning operation that has made it one of the country’s largest Catholic universities by enrollment. The university launched its first doctoral program in 2013 and remains closely linked to the Benedictine community at Saint Leo Abbey. Pasco-Hernando State College, founded as Pasco-Hernando Community College in 1972 and renamed in 2014 to reflect its expansion into bachelor’s degree programs, operates campuses at Dade City (the historic main campus, on land deeded by the Coleman family), New Port Richey (West Campus), Spring Hill (North Campus, in Hernando County), and the Porter Campus at Wiregrass Ranch. Together with branch operations of the University of South Florida, the University of Tampa, and other regional institutions, these provide a substantial higher-education infrastructure for what has historically been an under-served county.
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RELIGION IN PASCO
The religious landscape of Pasco County reflects its complex demographic history. The Catholic Colony of San Antonio and St. Leo gave the eastern county a strong Catholic presence from the 1880s onward, unusual in the Southern context. The Benedictine monks of Saint Leo founded Catholic parishes throughout west-central Florida, and Pasco today retains a substantial Catholic population, particularly in the eastern communities and increasingly throughout the suburbanizing south. Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal Protestant congregations have historically dominated the more rural sections of the county. Black Christian denominations, particularly the AME, AMEZ, Missionary Baptist, and various Pentecostal traditions, have anchored the social life of Pasco’s historic African American communities. More recent immigration has brought a wider religious diversity: Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and various Asian Christian congregations have been established, particularly in the Wesley Chapel area, reflecting the substantial Indian, Pakistani, and other South and Southeast Asian populations of the new suburbs.
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The Zephyrhills area has historically been home to a substantial population of Snowbird residents — winter visitors, primarily from the Midwest and Canada — many of whom have a strong Methodist or Lutheran heritage, and these traditions remain visible in the city’s churches.
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CULTURE AND COMMUNITY LIFE
The cultural life of Pasco County reflects its mix of populations and traditions. Each major town has its signature event: the Kumquat Festival in Dade City in late January, the Chasco Fiesta in New Port Richey each March, the Rattlesnake Festival in San Antonio each October, the Pioneer Florida Day in Dade City on Labor Day weekend, the Cotee River Bike Fest in New Port Richey, the Founders Day celebration in Zephyrhills. Smaller community festivals — Christmas tree lightings, fall harvest events, summer concerts in the park — animate every corner of the county.
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The arts community in Pasco has grown substantially in recent decades, particularly in the New Port Richey area, where the Richey Suncoast Theatre has operated since the 1990s in a restored historic building on Main Street, and where galleries and craft studios have proliferated along the downtown Main Street. The West Pasco Historical Society, founded in 1970 and operating the Rao Musunuru Museum in downtown New Port Richey at Sims Park, has preserved a substantial collection of artifacts and documentary materials. The East Pasco Historical Society, with which the Pioneer Florida Museum is closely associated, maintains the historic site in Dade City. The Pasco County Historical Society, founded in 1957, brings together scholars, family historians, and amateur enthusiasts across the entire county.
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Sports and recreation are central to community life. Spring training operations of the New York Yankees (at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa) and the Philadelphia Phillies and Detroit Tigers (in nearby Clearwater and Lakeland) bring substantial Pasco audiences. The Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus in Wesley Chapel, opened in the 2020s, hosts major regional sports tournaments. Skydive City at Zephyrhills draws sport parachutists from around the world. Golf, fishing, kayaking, and a wide variety of outdoor sports take advantage of the county’s coastline, lakes, rivers, and conservation lands. The Suncoast Parkway Trail, the Withlacoochee State Trail, and the planned Orange Belt Trail provide hundreds of miles of paved cycling and walking trails across the county.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
The government of Pasco County has, like that of every Florida county, evolved substantially over its 138-year history. The original constitutional officers — Sheriff, Tax Collector, Property Appraiser, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Supervisor of Elections — still exist and are elected countywide. The county is governed by a five-member Board of County Commissioners elected to four-year staggered terms from single-member districts but elected at-large. A County Administrator, chosen by the Board, oversees day-to-day operations. The county adopted home rule and a charter government in 2012 by voter referendum, granting it broader authority over local matters under the state constitution.
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The political character of the county has shifted with its demographics. From its founding through the 1950s, Pasco was a “yellow-dog Democrat” county in the Solid South tradition; the Democratic primary, dominated by white voters in the era of segregation, effectively determined elections. As the retirement migration of the postwar era brought Northern-born voters in great numbers, the county’s politics began to shift. By the 1980s, the county was being contested seriously by Republicans, particularly in west Pasco. The county now leans Republican in most national elections and increasingly in state and local elections, though specific outcomes vary substantially by district and by the personalities and issues involved.
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The county is represented in the United States House of Representatives by members from the 12th and 15th districts, with the boundaries having shifted over time. Pasco’s most prominent recent congressional representative, Gus Bilirakis, has served the area since 2007 in successor districts of his father, Michael Bilirakis, who himself represented Pasco for many years. In the Florida Legislature, Pasco is represented by multiple senators and representatives from districts that have likewise shifted over redistricting cycles.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TOWARD THE FUTURE
As of 2025, Pasco County is one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida. Its population, estimated at roughly 682,000, has grown by more than 120,000 since the 2020 census, representing an average annual growth rate of about 3.5 percent. Projections from the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research suggest the county will add another 200,000 or more residents by 2045, reaching roughly 800,000. Pasco’s growth between 1970 and 2020 represented a 639 percent increase in population, compared to a 217 percent increase for Florida as a whole during the same period. The transformation has no historical parallel in the county’s record.
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The growth is concentrated in central and southern Pasco — particularly along the State Road 54 and State Road 56 corridors, around Wesley Chapel, Land O’ Lakes, Trinity, and the new Angeline and Connerton communities. The older communities of west Pasco along U.S. 19, the historic east Pasco towns of Dade City and Zephyrhills, and the small communities of central and north Pasco continue to grow but at slower rates.
The challenges facing Pasco in the coming decades are substantial. Traffic congestion has become a daily reality on the major arterials and increasingly even on State Road 54 and Interstate 75, where chronic congestion has prompted a series of major expansion projects. The county is investing in road improvements, including the widening of Wesley Chapel Boulevard, the construction of a Diverging Diamond interchange at I-75 and State Road 56, and major resurfacing and widening of SR 54 across central Pasco. Public transit, historically minimal in Pasco, has slowly expanded through the Pasco County Public Transportation system and through coordination with regional transit agencies, though the dispersed, low-density development pattern of most of the county makes traditional transit difficult.
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Affordable housing has emerged as a serious challenge, particularly since the rapid run-up in home prices during the 2020s. Property values in Pasco — historically among the most affordable in the Tampa Bay area — have approximately doubled since 2018 in many submarkets. The combination of rapid population growth, increasing demand, and constrained supply has put homeownership out of reach for many working families. The county’s recently approved long-range plan, Pasco 2050, identifies housing affordability as a top priority.
Water and environmental issues remain central to the county’s future. The aquifer recharge areas of the Green Swamp must be protected if Pasco is to retain access to its historic groundwater supplies. The fragility of the coastline has been demonstrated dramatically by the 2024 hurricanes, and substantial public investment in coastal resilience — including drainage improvements, beach nourishment, and possible buyout programs for repeatedly flooded properties — is likely in the coming decade. The Withlacoochee River basin, the Pithlachascotee, the Anclote, and the great spring system at Crystal Springs and Weeki Wachee (just north of the county) all need ongoing protection.
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The economic transformation associated with the Moffitt Cancer Center development, the Pasco Innovation District, and related life-sciences investment offers the prospect of a substantially different economic future. If the projections materialize, central Pasco could become a regional center of biomedical research, attracting a new kind of educated workforce and generating high-wage jobs that have historically been scarce in the county. This in turn could shift the political and cultural character of the county further, making it less of a bedroom community for Tampa and more of an independent center of economic activity.
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THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
What is striking, after such transformation, is how much of the old Pasco County remains visible to the patient observer. The historic 1909 courthouse still presides over Dade City. The Saint Leo Abbey church still rises above Lake Jovita. The Zephyrhills Depot, the Pioneer Florida Museum, the Hacienda Hotel, the New Port Richey Main Street, the old commercial blocks of Trilby and Lacoochee, the Anclote Key Lighthouse — all bear witness to the layered history this paper has tried to sketch. Cattle still graze on portions of the great inland ranches; orange groves, though much reduced, still bloom each spring across portions of east Pasco; cypress hammocks still stand along the Withlacoochee. The Black communities of Trilby and Lacoochee, the Catholic communities of San Antonio and St. Leo, the snowbird communities of Zephyrhills, the retirement communities of Holiday and Bayonet Point, the master-planned communities of Wesley Chapel and Trinity — each carries some piece of the longer story.
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To live in Pasco County in the twenty-first century is to live amid the residues of many earlier Florida histories: the Native American era, the Spanish colonial encounter, the Seminole Wars, the cattle and citrus pioneer era, the railroad era, the Catholic and Civil War colonization movements, the Florida Land Boom, the New Deal, the Second World War, the postwar retirement migration, the Tampa Bay suburbanization, and now an emerging biomedical economy. The result is a place that does not fit easily into any of the standard categories of American place. It is not exactly rural and not exactly suburban; not exactly Southern and not exactly Northern; not exactly Floridian in the Disney-and-beach-resort sense and not exactly Floridian in the cracker-and-Cattlemen sense. It is, instead, its own thing — a particular west-central Florida county, with a particular and continuing story.
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EPILOGUE
The history of Pasco County is a history of waves of newcomers and a history of the slow adaptations of those who came before to those who came after. The Tocobaga gave way to the Seminole; the Seminole to the pioneer; the pioneer to the railroad town; the railroad town to the citrus colony; the citrus colony to the bust; the bust to the retirement subdivision; the retirement subdivision to the master-planned suburb. At each stage the prior landscape and the prior population continued to exist alongside the new, slowly absorbing or being absorbed.
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The future of Pasco County will likely follow the same pattern. The arrivals of the next half-century — drawn by biomedical research jobs, by the relative affordability of the county compared to Hillsborough and Pinellas, by the warm climate, by the long Florida tradition of new starts on cheap land — will encounter a county already significantly different from the one their parents or grandparents knew. They will, in turn, change it further. And the legacy of the Tocobaga middens, of the Fort King Road, of the Catholic colony, of the Civil War veterans’ Zephyrhills, of the freeze-ruined orange groves, of the Lacoochee mill, of the postwar canal subdivisions, of the Suncoast Parkway, will continue to shape the place in ways that no map can quite capture.
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The county that bears the name of an English-born Confederate-veteran Florida senator who never set foot on its soil; that contains an abbey founded by a Catholic former chief justice of the Arizona Territory; that grew up around a Union veterans’ colony advertised in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania newspapers; that holds the descendants of pioneer cow hunters and of survivors of the Rosewood massacre; that hosts skydivers from around the world at a former World War II fighter base and cancer researchers at a former cattle ranch — this is a curious, layered, and altogether American place. Its history is still being written.
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A NOTE ON SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
This narrative has drawn on a range of published, archival, and online sources. The classic published histories of the county include Jefferson Alexis Hendley’s History of Pasco County (1943); Ralph Bellwood’s Tales of West Pasco (1962); Harry G. Cooper’s The Story of Hudson, Florida (1973); Rosemary Wallace Trottman’s various works on Zephyrhills, including The History of Zephyrhills, 1821–1921; and Madonna Jervis Wise’s Images of America volumes on various Pasco communities including Wesley Chapel, Dade City, and Land O’ Lakes. The published “Genesis of New Port Richey” by Elroy M. Avery (1924) is an irreplaceable primary source for the early history of that community.
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Archival materials are concentrated at several institutions: the West Pasco Historical Society (operating the Rao Musunuru Museum) in New Port Richey; the Pioneer Florida Museum and Village near Dade City; the State Archives of Florida in Tallahassee, accessible online through Florida Memory; the University of South Florida’s Special Collections in Tampa; and the Pasco County Clerk’s office, which maintains historic county records. The online resource Fivay.org, maintained for many years by local historian Jeff Cannon, provides invaluable transcriptions and indexes of newspaper articles, historical markers, and other materials relating to Pasco history. Adam J. Carozza’s master’s thesis “New Port Richey: Myth and History of a City Built on Enchantment” (University of South Florida, 2008) provides a particularly thorough academic treatment of that city.
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The Florida Historical Quarterly, published by the Florida Historical Society since 1908, contains numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of Pasco history, including Frank Laumer’s “This Was Fort Dade” (1966) and Michael G. Schene’s “Fort Foster: A Second Seminole War Fort” (1976). For the prehistoric and Native American period, John H. Hann’s Indians of Central and South Florida 1513–1763 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003) and Jerald T. Milanich’s various works on Florida archaeology, including The Timucua (1996), provide essential foundations. For the post–World War II era, contemporary newspaper accounts in the Tampa Tribune, the St. Petersburg Times (later Tampa Bay Times), the Pasco Times, the Suncoast News, the Laker/Lutz News, and the Tampa Beacon are indispensable sources. The Pasco Economic Development Council’s regular reports document the county’s recent economic development.
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Several authors are presently at work on additional published histories of the county and its component communities. The story of Pasco County will continue to be written and rewritten for as long as the county exists — which is, on present trends, likely to be a very long time indeed.