For a century Florida's economy included an important yet unique component having no counterpart elsewhere in the United States - the collection and marketing of sponges. Sponges occur virtually worldwide, but only a very few species have human utility. These are concentrated particularly in two regions, the eastern Mediterranean and under some 9,300 square miles of shallow Gulf waters along parts of the Florida coast. Florida's sponging industry came to be strongly influenced eventually by spongers from the eastern Mediterranean, where sponging had a history stretching back into antiquity.
The Mediterranean linkage did not appear during the first fifty years of Florida's industry, however, when sponging was confined to the Key Grounds centered mainly in Florida Bay. The first sponge market opened at Key West in 1849. The Key Grounds remained the source of sponges for the Key West market for almost twenty-five years, but in 1873 sponges were discovered farther north, in what became known as the Bay Grounds, extending from St. Petersburg to St. Marks. As the abundance and high quality of sponges in the Bay Grounds became better known, spongers began to operate from coastal inlets north of St. Petersburg, particularly from the vicinity of the new settlement of TarponÊSprings. At first Bay Grounds sponges were marketed through Key West, but eventually Tarpon Springs came to dominate marketing.
Until this time sponging in Florida waters had been pursued exclusively by individuals native to Florida, but during 1905-1907 the Florida industry was fundamentally transformed by Greek immigrants and their sponging technology. Sponging in Mediterranean waters had become remarkably concentrated in the hands of generations of Greek spongers living on rocky, dry, virtually treeless Kalimnos and adjacent islands in the Aegean Sea. As they gradually depleted the Aegean sponge grounds toward the end of the nineteenth century, they sailed to more distant grounds, particularly to those in coastal waters of Libya and Egypt. Their sponging expanded not only geographically but technologically; by about 1886 they had begun to employ copper-helmeted diving suits allowing them to sponge in deeper waters. In turn, as thousands of Greek spongers began to migrate in 1905 to the new economic opportunities at Tarpon Springs, they introduced diving suits and diving vessels with air pumps and hoses. They created a major multimillion-dollar industry that only ended toward midcentury with a redÊtide and then the advent of synthetic sponges.
