When PonceÊdeÊLeon sighted Florida in the early spring of 1513, his presence in, what he thought of as a new land, had been preceded by thousands of years of Indian occupancy. At least 100,000 Indians were living there. Those in the north were agriculturalists, while most of those in the south lived off the natural bounty of land and sea. The Indians in the north shared many features with other Indians of the Southeast, including settlement in villages, chief-centered political organization, and elaborate burial rituals.

The First Spanish Period, 1513-1763
    By 1500 Spain had achieved political unification. The final reconquest of Spain from the Moors occurred in 1492, the very year Columbus reached the West Indies. Its nobles, their military and crusading goals within Spain accomplished, were now seeking new realms to conquer. For Ponce de Leon and the leaders who followed him to the coasts of Florida:Ayllon, Narvaez, deÊSoto, de Luna, and others, the search for wealth and the fascination of uncharted lands led them and their men to the limits of human endurance. At the beginning of de Soto's march inland from Tampa Bay, when a long procession of mounted knights, foot soldiers, and servants set forth, major Spanish colonial activity in Florida might have seemed assured, but this was not to be; the fortunes in gold and silver that Cortes and Pizarro encountered in Mexico and Peru were not to be found in la Florida.
    The failure to find riches dampened Spanish interest in Florida, but French efforts to establish a colony, first under JeanÊRibault at Port Royal Sound in present-day South Carolina in 1562, then under Rene de Laudonniere at the mouth of the St. Johns River in 1564, forced the Spanish emperor Philip II to act. Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Captain General of the Spanish Treasure Fleets, was dispatched to eliminate the French presence and to found a Spanish settlement. Both charges were quickly accomplished in 1565, and the resulting settlement, SanÊAugustin, was to be the primary Spanish settlement in Florida in the following 200 years.
    Missionary activity began with the founding of St. Augustine. The first mission field was extended northward along the coast of present-day Georgia and South Carolina, and in the 1600s a second mission chain was established westward as far as the Apalachee Bay region. By 1710, however, virtually all of these thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub missions had been destroyed by English-led Indian attacks launched from the new English colony of Carolina.
    Spain valued Florida for its location. Spanish Florida together with Cuba commanded the vital sea route from the Gulf of Mexico and helped shelter Mexico from potential rival European colonial expansion. Few Spanish colonists came to Florida. Throughout the two centuries of Spanish rule the colony depended on government subsidy. By 1763, when Florida was yielded to Britain in the treaty ending the Seven Years' War, the population of St. Augustine was only about 3,000, that of Pensacola under 800. War, disease, and forced or voluntary migrations out of Florida had virtually eliminated the original Indian tribes in the colony.

British Rule, 1763-1783
    Among the first acts of Florida's new rulers was a proclamation creating the two separate colonies of East and West Florida, each with its own seat of government, at St. Augustine and Pensacola respectively. The western boundary of the new colony of West Florida was fixed at the Mississippi River.
    With the Spanish and the Indians gone, the British had essentially an empty territory. To encourage settlement, two types of land grants were made: large allotments not requiring homesteading by the recipient and smaller parcels to heads of families stipulating settlement for confirmation of title. A number of plantations based on slave labor and growing primarily indigo and rice appeared especially along the St. Johns River and adjacent coastal areas in East Florida. Creek Indians from Georgia and present-day Alabama filtered into the vacant interior of northern Florida, and began to be called Seminoles.

The Second Spanish Period, 1784-1821
    The defeat of Britain by the combination of American, French, and Spanish forces brought Spain back to East and West Florida by the peace treaty of 1783. In the ensuing thirty-five years, however, continuing decline of Spanish power and increasing numbers of Americans north of Florida progressively eroded the viability of the two colonies. By 1819, the western boundary of Spanish political control in West Florida had retracted eastward to the Perdido River.
    During the second Spanish term in Florida, additional land grants were made, mainly in northeastern East Florida and contiguous to Pensacola Bay. Sugarcane plantings began in northeastern Florida. Creek Indians continued to move into Florida. American incursions across the border in search of runaway slaves increased, as did attacks on Indians thought to be sheltering slaves. Recognizing its inability to control increasing turbulence in its colonies, Spain ceded East and West Florida to the United States in 1819, with transfer being finalized in 1821.

Territory and Early Statehood, 1821-1876
    AndrewÊJackson, nominated by President Monroe and confirmed by the Senate as first governor of the two colonies acquired from Spain, organized a single Territory of Florida with two counties, Escambia and St. Johns. The new legislative council met at Pensacola, the old capital of West Florida, in 1822 and at St. Augustine, the former capital of East Florida, in 1823. These two chief settlements of the new territory were separated by 400 miles of virtual wilderness, rendering desirable a more central site for a capital. Tallahassee was accordingly founded in 1824 midway between the two older settlements, and the territorial council met there for the first time late in that year.
    Settlement in the territorial period occurred primarily in the area between the Suwannee and Apalachicola rivers, in what became known as Middle Florida. A government land survey, which had to precede the sale of public lands to settlers, was initiated at Tallahassee in 1824 with the demarcation there of the east-west baseline and north-south meridian from which the rectangular township and range survey system was then extended. Meanwhile, settlement in East Florida and in the Pensacola area was slowed by unclear land titles associated with grants made by previous regimes. Moreover, much of northern peninsular Florida was occupied by Indians until the end of the Second Seminole War (1835-42).
    As cotton production expanded westward from the Atlantic seaboard, it largely bypassed Florida, but some planters with their slaves did move into extreme northern Middle Florida in the territorial and early statehood period and an east-west plantation belt centered in Leon County developed along a zone of comparatively fertile loamy soils. One of the earliest railroads in the United States, from Tallahassee to St. Marks, was built to expedite the export of cotton to the textile mills of England and New England.
    With the end of the Second Seminole War, the peninsula southward to the Kissimmee valley was opened for settlement. Land title problems in northeast Florida and the Pensacola area were also gradually resolved. Except in the specialized plantation districts, the first wave of frontier settlement generally consisted of woods ranchers who came with their tough, wiry cattle. These cattlemen, gradually displaced over much of northern Florida by small farmers, continued to drift southward into the peninsula. The new small farms, which were forest-girt clearings with patches of corn, sweet potatoes, cotton, and a bit of sugarcane for syrup, became common by 1850. Plantations producing long-staple Sea Island cotton and sugarcane increased in the St. Johns River country, and an isolated sugarcane plantation district emerged along the Manatee River. Apalachicola flourished on the export of Georgia and Alabama cotton. After 1855, railroad construction became significant in northern Florida. Remote from all these changes, a unique amphibious economy involving fishing, turtling, sponging, salt making and shipwreck salvaging developed on the Keys and in the shallow tropical seas enveloping them. Key West, with an 1860 population of over 2,800, was one of the two largest cities in Florida; the other was Pensacola.
    In 1850, approximately 50 percent of Florida's population was white, but in plantation areas, the black population outnumbered the white. After the Seminole wars the few remaining Seminoles melted into the hammocks of the Everglades. In the twentieth century their descendents have become politically active and have revitalized traditional Seminole culture.
    Florida, along with the rest of the South, emerged from the Civil War with a virtually bankrupt economy. Coastal settlements had been raided and heavily damaged and much railroad and other equipment was inoperative. Railroad companies had defaulted on their bond obligations. Plantation organization, disrupted by emancipation, was replaced with sharecropping.
    Sales of cotton and timber gradually alleviated to some extent the state's straitened economic conditions. Cotton again flowed to mills in England and New England. Florida already had a long history of timber cutting, but the scale of operations to supply markets in Europe and the American Northeast now increased dramatically. By the 1870s, hundreds of ships cleared Pensacola, Jacksonville, Fernandina, and other ports each year with cargoes of pine, cypress, and oak timber.

New Directions, 1876-1900
    As Reconstruction years receded into the past, new currents in the Florida economy became perceptible. In its characteristics and its leadership the new economy was to depart increasingly from that of the antebellum era. Whereas the plantation owners had been the social, political, and economic leaders of an agrarian state, the new leaders were to come into Florida from other areas, chiefly the North, bringing with them capital for transportation, landÊspeculation, tourism, mining, finance and other business enterprises. Although accelerating changes came to Florida in the final decades of the nineteenth century, they did not at first produce wholesale changes in the landscapes of the state. Many attributes of earlier Florida survived beyond 1880, in some cases well into the twentieth century. Not only the old cotton plantation belt of northern Florida but other areas into which cotton production had spread, such as Alachua County, continued to grow the traditional crop until the end of the century and beyond. In 1880, unfenced or open-range grazing of cattle prevailed over a huge area extending from the vicinity of St. Augustine southward and southwestward to the Gulf coast. Florida had all the attributes of open-range ranching in the Old West, including the roundup, branding, corrals, the long drive along cattle trails, and the cow town of Ft. Myers, where cattle changed hands before shipment to Cuba. Frederic Remington, artist of the Old West, came to Florida to capture scenes from this phase of old Florida.
    The steamboat, which had appeared on Florida rivers earlier in the century, not only survived into the later nineteenth century, but actually reached its greatest use in these years. Steamboats hauled local passengers and freight, and their river trips to new hotels and scenic springs such as Silver Springs contributed to the initial development of a tourist industry in the state. We can at least glimpse this feature of a now vanished Florida through the lines of Sidney Lanier describing his trip up the Oklawaha River: "As we advanced up the stream our wee craft even seemed to emit her steam in more leisurely whiffs..." As the river narrowed he wrote: "The lucent current lost all semblance of water. It was simply a distillation of many-shaded foliages, smoothly sweeping along beneath us." And as night came: "The stream, which had been all day a baldrick of beauty, sometimes black and sometimes green, now became a black band of mystery. But presently a brilliant flame flares out overhead: they have lighted the pine-knots on top of the pilot house."
    After 1880, railroad construction was implemented by the sale of 4 million acres of state-owned land at twenty-five cents per acre to Hamilton Disston, a Philadelphia entrepreneur and speculator, thereby providing the state with funds to clear liens on state-owned land acreages incurred from earlier railroad promotion. The combination of new state land grants to railroad companies to underwrite construction costs and a new group of railroad developers led by rivals Henry Plant and HenryÊFlagler resulted in rapid, and at times feverish, extension of lines southward on the peninsula. During the first few years of the new railroad building period, new lines connected existing settlements, but soon the rails were pushed southward faster than the pace of settlement. Thereafter, at Tampa, Palm Beach, and Miami, as in much of the western United States, settlement followed the railroads. Completed railroads encouraged the beginning of rapid population growth in southern Florida.
    In other ways the face of Florida also began to change. Citrus production increased and advanced southward down the central sandy and hilly axis of the peninsula toward the Orlando area. As the Florida railway system finally became effectively linked with the larger national rail system in the 1880s, winter fruit and vegetable production in the more nearly tropical parts of Florida began. Lumbering spread outward along new railroad lines. Mining of phosphate began. Improvements in Florida port facilities, especially at Tampa, followed the congestion and confusion during the Spanish-American War. Cigar making, which had been introduced earlier at Key West by Cubans, followed Vincente Ybor to Tampa. Sponging developed out of Tarpon Springs.
    As the twentieth century began, Jacksonville with a population over 28,000 had become the largest city in Florida. Pensacola and Key West each had somewhat over 17,000 and Tampa had almost 16,000.

The Twentieth Century
    In the twentieth century Florida's population and economy have grown rapidly. In the nineteenth century, the state's relative rates of population and economic growth had been high, but only because the starting base for measurement had been so small; in absolute growth Florida lagged behind many other parts of the United States. In the present century, however, and particularly since midcentury, Florida's absolute increases in population and in economy have ranked among the highest in the nation.
       Although many factors have contributed to the dynamism of Florida's growth in population and economy in the present century, of fundamental significance has been the state's almost tropical peninsula that is politically part of a large, wealthy country of some 250 million people whose territory lies predominantly in middle latitudes where climates tend toward prolonged winter cold. Florida's middle latitude connections underlie in particular three major aspects of its twentieth century economy: retirement, tourism, and much of its agriculture. In the present century, Florida has become the retirement home of millions of Americans. Tourism, from its small beginnings in the latter nineteenth century, has expanded enormously. Although it was Florida beaches, lakes, and landscapes that were at first prized by winter visitors seeking respite from winter cold, the subsequent addition of other tourist-related attractions such as Disney World now brings domestic and foreign visitors year-round. And major segments of Florida's twentieth century agriculture produce subtropical crops for the nation's wealthy middle latitude markets. Citrus plantings, particularly after exceptional freezes in the 1890s, decimated groves in the original citrus area in northeast Florida, continued to extend southward on the peninsula. Production of out-of-season fruits and particularly vegetables expanded for the large and wealthy wintertime market in the North. Sugarcane preempted much of the new agricultural area that was developed south of Lake Okeechobee.
    Other twentieth century changes in Florida's economy have also effected major alteration in Florida life and landscapes. Cotton production ended because of a complex of factors including the bollÊweevil and was replaced by a more diversified agriculture of soybeans, corn, and hay crops, and by forest. Some of the old cotton belt plantations were acquired as long-range investments by northern capital and became forested quailÊplantations. Open-range cattle grazing ended toward midcentury as cattle tick fever and screwworm fly infestations were eradicated and as cattlemen acquired and fenced land, replaced native range with planted pastures, and introduced superior livestock strains. These changes made possible a new form of live-stock ranching linked for the first time to an American rather than a Cuban market. New types of manufacturing appeared, including large pulp and paper mills, chemical plants and light aircraft, whereas certain earlier industries such as cigar manufacture declined. Military reservations such as Eglin Air Force Base became significant in the state's economy. Steamboat traffic disappeared. Rail passenger travel earlier increased, then almost disappeared in the face of new highways and air travel, leaving the railroads primarily as freight carriers. The largest scale phosphate mining in the country appeared in part of Polk and Hillsborough counties, and came to dominate outbound cargoes at the port of Tampa. After midcentury, the space complex in Brevard County anchored the eastern end of a belt of higher population density which developed across central Florida.
    By the opening years of the twentieth century, the Everglades were regarded as a barrier to further settlement and their drainage was urged. Programs of drainage beginning in 1906, drastically modified the hydrology of inland south Florida, and new agricultural developments on the deep organic soils south of Lake Okeechobee became possible. But as people moved into the interior of south Florida, they encountered an environment quite different from anything they had previously experienced. Costs in life and fortune were high, as in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928. Engineering works were undertaken to deal with the perceived excess of water in the region, but more recently potential long-run deficiencies in south Florida's water supply have begun to be recognized. Problems of sound land and water management in south Florida remain unsolved.
Florida's population had been concentrated in the northern end of the state, but in the twentieth century the earlier pattern was fundamentally altered as population concentrations shifted to the central and southern parts of the peninsula. Population moving into southern Florida became essentially coastal, being channeled onto the slightly elevated AtlanticÊcoastalÊridge and along the Gulf coast and away from the interior wetlands. UrbanÊsprawl developed. The search for jobs in urbanized southern Florida attracted black people as well as whites southward, producing inner city black ghettos with accompanying economic and social problems, particularly in Miami. A persistent theme in Florida's history, the relationship with Cuba, was again manifested in the second half of the twentieth century with the large Cuban refugee influx into the Miami area, heightening the Hispanic character of what has become Florida's largest urban complex. Indeed, viewed in broader perspective, population has been converging on southern Florida from both North America and Latin America.
    When President Monroe appointed Jackson to organize the Territory of Florida in 1821, he implied that among other expected improvements, smuggling would henceforth be contained. By the latter twentieth century, however, the scale of smuggling into Florida far surpassed the operations of smugglers in Jackson's day. The location of Florida relative to Latin America, and its long coastline, have encouraged the routing through Florida of much of the drugs smuggled into the United States.
    Florida in the twentieth century has had its own population explosion. Residences built for retirees range from spacious homes to sprawling mobile home parks. But among those who migrated to the state were individuals possessing wealth and an interest in the arts; and their museums, theatres, concert halls, libraries, and homes that now grace its cities display an exceptional diversity of architectural styles. In its display of examples of new approaches to architecture and urban design, Florida has become an outstanding part of the United States. Examples, visible in all parts of the state, range from the newly designed Florida panhandle town of Seaside to the curving building in Orlando housing the World Headquarters of the Turbine Division of Westinghouse and to the new Caribbean Marketplace in Miami, which in 1991 received the prestigious American Institute of Architects award.
     The in-migration of many younger persons responding to rapidly expanding employment opportunities, particularly in service occupations, created enormous pressures in turn for still more services, including an expansion in the system of public and private universities and colleges. But the very pace and scale of population growth threaten to destroy much of Florida's beauty and to impair irreparably the ecology upon which its well-being depends. Excessive drainage of wetlands, construction of miles of artificial waterfront, hazardousÊwaste discharges, and unplanned urban sprawl are manifestations of population growth outrunning orderly, careful accommodation to the special qualities of the Florida environment. By 1990, thirteen million Floridians had a far less stable relationship with the environment than had the Indians of Ponce de Leon's time.