The Bay Itself
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
Tampa Bay is four hundred square miles of estuarine water, the largest open-water estuary in Florida, and the reason everything else in this region exists where it does.
The Tocobaga built their capital here because the bay was one of the most productive fisheries on the Gulf Coast, a shallow, warm, grass-bed system that produced more marine life per acre than almost any comparable body of water in North America. They harvested from it for centuries and left middens of shells that survive as the physical record of how well the bay provided.
The Spanish came because the bay offered a large natural harbor on Florida's Gulf coast, one that could be dredged to take ocean-going ships. Henry Plant built his railroad to Tampa, and not to some other Florida city, because the port could move cargo. The phosphate industry chose Tampa because the bay connected the inland mining districts to ocean shipping lanes. The cigar manufacturers came to Ybor City and West Tampa partly because the bay's rail and shipping connections made Cuban leaf tobacco accessible.
The bay was also nearly destroyed by the twentieth century.
By the nineteen sixties and seventies, industrial discharge, agricultural runoff, and the sewage of a rapidly growing metropolitan area had reduced the bay's water clarity to the point where the seagrass beds that anchored the entire ecosystem were dying. Seagrass requires sunlight to survive. Pollution blocks sunlight. By the nineteen seventies, the bay had lost more than eighty percent of its seagrass coverage compared to early-century baselines. The fish populations that had sustained the Tocobaga were in severe decline.
What followed is one of the better environmental recovery stories in American history. A regional sewage treatment upgrade, limits on industrial discharge, and coordinated restoration efforts produced measurable results over the following decades. Seagrass coverage returned to levels not seen since the nineteen fifties. Manatees and dolphins returned to waters that had driven them out.
The bay that the Tocobaga fished, that the Spanish sailed, that the cigar economy crossed and the phosphate industry loaded, is substantially healthier today than it was fifty years ago. That is not a common sentence in the environmental history of American industrial waterways.
