Polk City: Crossroads at the Heart of Polk County
Near Lakeland, Florida
Polk City sits in the middle of Polk County, which sits near the middle of the Florida peninsula, between the Gulf and the Atlantic coasts. The town incorporated in nineteen twenty-five during Florida's land boom, when speculators and investors were buying and selling Florida real estate so fast that plots changed hands before the ink dried. Polk City rode the momentum of the boom before the bust arrived in nineteen twenty-six and the hurricane of nineteen twenty-eight leveled the optimism along with the coastlines.
The county it sits in is named for President James K. Polk, who served from eighteen forty-five to eighteen forty-nine and whose presidency added more land to the United States than any except Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase: Texas, California, Oregon, and the Mexican Cession all came in under Polk. The county's other identity is phosphate: Polk County contains some of the world's richest phosphate deposits, mined since the eighteen eighties to make fertilizer that feeds crops globally. Polk City itself stayed small, but the land around it tells a larger story about Florida's two economies: the citrus and the mineral underneath it.
