Florida Historical Economy Eras

The Florida Department of State's brief history moves from late 1800s commercial agriculture, especially cattle raising, through the economic bubble that burst in 1926, to World War II, which it says spurred economic development in Florida (Florida Department of State).

The history is the state's own narrative; the 2025 row comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics count of jobs covered by unemployment insurance, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which reports annual average employment for Florida as a whole (BLS QCEW). Older eras have no comparable job count on these official pages, so the earlier rows describe industries rather than measure them.

Florida's transportation industry grew out of the Internal Improvement Act the state legislature passed in 1855, which offered cheap or free public land to investors, particularly in transportation (Florida Department of State).

The act had its greatest effect between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I, when companies owned by Henry Flagler and Henry B. Plant built railroads across the state and put lavish hotels beside their lines (Department of State). The same act started the first efforts to drain southern Florida for farmland. Rail changed the citrus trade in particular: an orange picked in south Florida could be eaten in Baltimore, Philadelphia or New York in less than a week.

Tourism appears in the same account: beginning in the 1870s, residents of northern states came to Florida for its scenery and mild climate, and steamboat tours on winding rivers were a favorite outing (Department of State). In 1898 Tampa served as the primary staging area for U.S. troops bound for the war in Cuba, and by the turn of the century, the Department of State says, Florida's population and per capita wealth were increasing rapidly.

Phosphate mining began in Florida in 1883 near Hawthorne in Alachua County, pebble phosphate mining began in central Florida in 1888, and Hamilton County mining followed in the 1960s, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP).

The early hard-rock phosphate came from a band running from Alachua to Citrus counties (FDEP). Mining today is mainly in Polk, Hillsborough, Manatee and Hardee counties, in a central Florida region of about 1.3 million acres known as the Bone Valley, plus one mine in Hamilton County. FDEP counts 28 phosphate mines covering more than 450,000 acres, of which 11 are active and 10 are fully reclaimed and released, and says mining disturbs between 3,000 and 6,000 acres a year in Florida, approximately 25 to 30 percent of it wetlands or other surface waters.

Alongside mining, the Department of State lists the late 1800s growth of large-scale commercial agriculture, especially cattle raising, a citrus industry that grew rapidly despite freezes, cigar manufacturing rooted in immigrant communities, and sponge harvesting at Tarpon Springs, and it places that era's phosphate mining in the southwestern part of the state, while FDEP dates the first mining to Alachua County (Florida Department of State). FDEP notes that Florida phosphate is primarily used to produce fertilizers for food production.

Florida's economic bubble burst in 1926, when money and credit ran out and banks and investors abruptly stopped trusting the "paper" millionaires, before the economic collapse began in the rest of the nation in 1929 (Florida Department of State).

The boom it ended had grown after World War I, when more Americans owned cars, vacationing in Florida became common, and land in southern Florida, some of it drained swamp, was sold and resold as profits and prices for many developers reached inflated levels (Department of State). Severe hurricanes in 1926 and 1928 damaged the economy further, so by 1929 Floridians were already used to hard times (Department of State).

Agriculture took its own hit in 1929, when the Mediterranean fruit fly invaded the state. A quarantine followed, troops set up roadblocks and checkpoints to search vehicles for contraband citrus, and Florida's citrus production was cut by about sixty percent (Florida Department of State). The Department of State's account of the same years also notes political change: the 1937 repeal of the poll tax and the 1944 Supreme Court ruling against all-white primaries.

World War II spurred Florida's economic development by making the state, with its year-round mild climate, a major training center for soldiers, sailors and aviators of the United States and its allies (Florida Department of State).

Highway and airport construction sped up during the war, leaving Florida with an up-to-date transportation network for residents and visitors by its end (Department of State). Steady population growth followed, from migration within the U.S. and from across the western hemisphere, notably Cuba and Haiti, and the Department of State calls Florida the third most populous state in the nation.

Since the war, the Department of State says, tourism, cattle, citrus and phosphate have been joined by electronics, plastics, construction, real estate and international banking; several major U.S. corporations moved their headquarters to Florida, the university and community college system expanded rapidly, and high-technology industries grew steadily (Florida Department of State). Launches from Cape Canaveral, the lunar landings and the space shuttle program brought the state wide attention, and the large theme parks in the Orlando area draw millions of visitors from the U.S. and abroad.

Florida had 9,914,411 jobs covered by unemployment insurance in 2025, and 7,755,371 in 2014; private natural resources and mining employment was 82,008 in 2014 and 63,976 in 2025 (BLS QCEW 2014; BLS QCEW 2025).

Figures are QCEW private-ownership annual averages for the state of Florida, with supersector names from the BLS high-level industry titles, where natural resources and mining combines agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting with mining (BLS industry titles). Information, other services and unclassified, the remaining private supersectors in the files, are not shown in the table (BLS QCEW 2025).

Pay moved too. Average annual pay across all Florida covered jobs was $44,803 in 2014 and $72,772 in 2025, in current dollars that are not adjusted for inflation (QCEW 2014; QCEW 2025). Leisure and hospitality, which BLS defines as arts, entertainment and recreation plus accommodation and food services, averaged $39,351 in annual pay in 2025 and $23,021 in 2014 (QCEW 2014). Last verified: October 18, 2026, when the four Department of State brief history pages, the FDEP phosphate page, the BLS supersector crosswalk and the 2014 and 2025 Florida QCEW annual files were fetched again and checked row by row.