Tampa Trivia and Firsts

Tampa's firmest first is aviation: the City of Tampa credits the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line of 1914 with the world's first scheduled commercial airline service.

According to the City of Tampa, Percival Ellicott Fansler introduced that service with the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. The aircraft was a Benoist flying boat, and its pilot was Tony Jannus, namesake of the Tony Jannus Award that the Tampa Chamber of Commerce presents each year for achievement in commercial aviation. The city's history page adds a dry footnote: the advent of the automobile soon clipped Jannus' wings, though it also drove a large settlement wave from 1923 to 1926.

A second first is civic. Hillsborough County lists Tampa as the first of three county communities to become a city, in 1855. Plant City incorporated thirty years later, in 1885, and Temple Terrace gained stature as a city in 1925, according to the county's birthday history.

Tampa's military story starts with a short gap. The City of Tampa notes that in 1824, only two months after the first American settler arrived, four companies of the U.S. Army established Fort Brooke to protect the harbor at Tampa Bay. Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon had reached the Tampa Bay area long before, in 1513, but the city's account says the Spaniards focused on settling eastern Florida and left the western areas alone.

Cigars and war made Tampa both a rallying point for Cuban independence and the main launching port for U.S. troops bound for Cuba in 1898.

The City of Tampa dates the cigar story to 1886, when Vicente Martinez Ybor established a cigar factory in Tampa. From the steps of that factory, the city's history page says, Jose Marti, sometimes called the George Washington of Cuba, exhorted the cigar workers to take up arms against Spain in the late 1800s. Ybor City still covers about 2 square miles between Nebraska Avenue, 22nd Street, Columbus Drive and East Broadway.

The war itself came through the port. The City of Tampa calls the city the primary outfitting and embarkation port for U.S. troops bound for Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and notes that U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command are now headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base. Two other entries on the same page explain much of Tampa's shape: Henry B. Plant's 1884 railroad extension to the Hillsborough River, along which he built lavish hotels, and Davis Island, a man-made island created by D.P. Davis during the 1920s settlement wave.

Tampa organized its local government six times between 1849 and 1887, as a village, a town and a city, then a reorganized city, a town again and the present city.

The incorporation history compiled for the City of Tampa Archives records that on January 18, 1849, 14 men voted unanimously to establish Tampa Village with a trustee form of government, and that the village elected five trustees a week later, with M.G. Sikes as president. Citizens voted to abolish that village on October 10, 1852, then organized as the Town of Tampa on September 10, 1853. On September 15, 1855 they abolished the town in favor of a city charter, which Governor Broome signed on December 15, 1855.

The sequence did not end there. The City Clerk's chronology records that Confederate military authorities suspended Tampa's city government on February 22, 1862, and that elections held under the Florida Legislature reorganized the city on October 25, 1866. On March 11, 1869, Tampa citizens backed a No Corporation People's Ticket to disenfranchise the city government, and on August 11, 1873 a town meeting voted to re-incorporate as the Town of Tampa. The present City of Tampa dates from July 15, 1887, when a special act of the Florida Legislature replaced both the Town of Tampa and the Town of North Tampa with a single city charter.

Each element of the Tampa city flag, adopted in 1930, stands for a nation or government that shaped the city, from Spain and Britain to Hillsborough County.

The City Clerk archives state that until 1930 the City of Tampa had no flag. In June 1930 a local industrial engineer, F. Grant Whitney, presented his design to Mayor D.B. McKay, who recommended it to the Board of Representatives. The board acted favorably on July 1, 1930, and one week later McKay publicly and officially accepted the flag from Whitney during a board session.

The design reads as a short history lesson. Red, white and blue stand for the Stars and Stripes; red and gold represent Spain, whose role in Tampa the archives date to the initial Spanish exploration of the Tampa Bay area in 1528; the Union Jack and portions of the crosses of St. Andrew and St. George mark the British period that began in 1763; and the colors of Italy and France portray other countries that contributed to the growth of Florida. A red, white and red stripe and the letter F stand for the state, a stylized H marks the 1834 creation of Hillsborough County, and the city seal on a blue T commemorates Tampa's birth as a city in 1855.

Two City of Tampa pages give different starting dates for Spain in Tampa Bay: the flag history uses 1528, while the city's general history page says Ponce de Leon first arrived in the Tampa Bay area in 1513. Both dates are reported here as each page gives them.

When Tampa was a village, Hillsborough County stretched across what are now nine counties and parts of two more, yet counted only 836 residents.

Hillsborough County says the U.S. Legislative Council for the Territory of Florida approved an act organizing Hillsborough as Florida's 19th county on January 25, 1834. Its anniversary history lists the original county as what are now Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, DeSoto, Hardee and Highlands counties, along with parts of Glades and Lee counties, with a population of just 836, not counting soldiers and Native Americans. Most of them lived in the village of Tampa. The same page notes that Andrew Jackson was president and that Florida would not become a state for another 11 years.

The name comes from London, not Tampa Bay. Hillsborough County takes its name from Wills Hill, British Secretary of State to the Colonies from 1768 to 1772. Government was modest at first: when the first county commissioners met in 1846, the county tax raised $148.69 for the year and commissioners were paid $2 per day while in session. The county's anniversary page, last modified in January 2024, says Hillsborough reached 1 million residents around 2000 and had grown to about 1.35 million.

A roadside marker at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park and a painting in a Tampa city office lobby both hold compact pieces of Tampa history.

According to the Hillsborough County marker program, Jimi Hendrix played Tampa on August 18 and November 23, 1968, at Curtis Hixon Hall, the site now occupied by Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. Both shows were near sellouts with more than 7,000 fans each night, and they were two of the 216 concerts the Jimi Hendrix Experience played from 1967 to 1970. The Hillsborough County Historical Advisory Council erected the marker in 2019 at North Ashley Drive and East Zack Street.

The City of Tampa reports that its Public Art Program commissioned artist Lynn Ash in 2003 to paint the Story of Tampa, a 4 by 8 foot oil on Masonite mural holding nearly 200 vignettes, portraits and images. Its border alone contains more than 50 small paintings within the painting, each specific to Tampa, among them devil crabs, citrus, Cuban bread, manatees and bananas. The mural hangs in the lobby of the Tampa Municipal Office Building.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the City of Tampa history page, the City Clerk's flag and incorporation archives, and three Hillsborough County history pages, with an unconfirmed Jules Verne item dropped.