The History of Clearwater

Long before the condos and the causeway, Clearwater was a place of freshwater springs bubbling up through a bluff above the bay. That's where the name comes from — and the story only gets better from there.

The land we call Clearwater was first home to the Tocobaga people, who lived along the shores and waterways of the Tampa Bay region long before European settlers arrived. In 1835, during the Seminole Wars, the U.S. Army built Fort Harrison — named for William Henry Harrison — on a bluff overlooking Clearwater Harbor. That bluff later became the early 20th-century neighbourhood of Harbor Oaks, and archaeologists from the University of South Florida excavated the old fort site in 1962.

After the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 offered 160 acres to anyone willing to farm the land, families like the Stevens, Stevenson, Sever, and McMullens moved in and claimed large tracts. Before 1906, the area was known as "Clear Water Harbor" — the name thought to come from a freshwater spring that flowed near where the old City Hall once stood, one of many springs that dotted the bluff and the bay itself.

The town began to grow in earnest in the late 1800s, helped along when Peter Demens finished the first passenger railroad into Clearwater in 1888. Clearwater was incorporated in 1891, with James E. Crane as its first mayor. A few years later, railroad magnate Henry B. Plant built the sprawling Victorian Belleview Biltmore hotel just south of town in 1897, cementing Clearwater's reputation as a vacation destination. By the early 1900s the year-round population was around 400, ballooning to nearly 1,000 each winter as northerners flocked south.

The city's oldest newspaper, the Clearwater Sun, first rolled off the press on March 14, 1914, and ran until 1989. Clearwater was reincorporated as a city on May 27, 1915, and became the county seat of Pinellas County, which had split from Hillsborough County in 1912.

In 1915 a bridge was built across Clearwater Harbor, connecting the city to Clearwater Beach to the west. The beach sits on its own barrier island but belongs to the city of Clearwater, fronting the Gulf of Mexico. Today a much higher bridge — the Clearwater Memorial Causeway, part of State Road 60 — arcs over the bay where that first crossing once stood.

During World War II, Clearwater became a major training base for troops bound for Europe and the Pacific. Nearly every hotel — including the Belleview Biltmore and the Fort Harrison Hotel — was pressed into service as a barracks for new recruits. Soldiers marched through downtown, nighttime blackouts were common, and the pre-development Sand Key was even used as a strafing and bombing target by Army Air Corps fighter-bombers.

From those springs on a bluff, Clearwater grew into a city of about 117,000 people — a place locals love and visitors return to year after year. The Clearwater Marine Aquarium (home of Winter the dolphin), sunsets at Pier 60, and a food scene worth bragging about all grew from that same stretch of coast. Not bad for a town named after a spring.

Sources: Wikipedia's "Clearwater, Florida" and the city's own historical record. Want to explore Clearwater today? Browse the directory.