Sun City Center: Tocobaga Ground Becomes a City Without Children
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
The shallow coastal plain of southern Hillsborough County was home to the Tocobaga people for well over a thousand years before Spanish explorers landed nearby in the fifteen hundreds. The Tocobaga built platform mounds along Tampa Bay and fished its estuaries, but Spanish contact brought disease that devastated coastal populations by the sixteen hundreds. Seminole families moved into the depopulated interior in the seventeen hundreds, until the Seminole Wars of the eighteen hundreds pushed most of them south or west.
The land then passed through successive agricultural owners. By the mid-nineteen hundreds it was a cattle and tomato ranch of more than twelve thousand acres. In early nineteen sixty-one the builder Del Webb purchased that ranch and opened Florida's first active-adult retirement community on December thirtieth, nineteen sixty-one.
The concept was radical: an entire town designed exclusively for residents over fifty-five. No children lived here. Golf courses replaced grazing pastures.
Sun City Center grew from a muddy former cattle ranch into a self-contained community of over twenty-five thousand retirees.
