Tampa Bay

No permanent settling happened in west central Florida until 1824, when the U.S. Army established a frontier outpost called Fort Brooke in what is now downtown Tampa. Phosphate was discovered near Tampa in 1883, and Henry B. Plant’s railroad reached the town shortly thereafter. Plant also built his fashionable Tampa Bay Hotel, now the University of Tampa, which housed Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders as they prepared their assault on Cuba in the Spanish-American War.

When the United States placed a large tax on Cuban cigars in 1857, many Cubans moved their factories to Tampa. By 1886 they also convinced Vincente Ybor to bring his Key West cigar operations up to Tampa. They were later joined by thousands of Italian immigrants from Sicily creating thirty-thousand hand-rolled cigars in more than two hundred factories. Each home in Ybor City received a warm loaf of fresh-baked Cuban bread, creased with a palm frond, with the morning paper.