Tampa Trivia and Firsts — Tampa, Florida

The firmest claim belongs to aviation. According to the City of Tampa, Percival Ellicott Fansler introduced the world's first scheduled commercial airline service in 1914 with the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. The aircraft was a Benoist flying boat, and its pilot was Tony Jannus, whose name lives on in 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 automobile soon clipped Jannus' wings.

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 city status 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 set up Fort Brooke to guard 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 Spain concentrated on eastern Florida and left the west coast largely alone.

In fiction, yes. FOX 13 reported in 2022 that Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon sends its moon mission aloft from a place Verne called Tampa Town, located between Old Tampa Bay on the northwest and Hillsborough Bay on the northeast. The station noted that Florida's east central coast was sparsely populated at the time, while Tampa already appeared on maps of the day.

The book left marks on the South Tampa map. FOX 13 notes that Jules Verne Court is a street in the Ballast Point neighborhood and that Ballast Point Park was once called Jules Verne Park. Rodney Kite-Powell of the Tampa Bay History Center pointed out how close Verne came to the real geography of spaceflight: Cape Canaveral, he said, is almost exactly due east of Tampa.

Verne got some things wrong. FOX 13 lists an imaginary 1,800-foot mountain near Tampa among the errors in the Tampa chapters. The same report says Verne's book became the basis for what is believed to be the first science fiction film, the 1902 French silent picture A Trip to the Moon, in which travelers ride a giant bullet fired from a cannon.

More often than most cities. The incorporation history compiled for the City of Tampa Archives lists a village government voted in on January 18, 1849, with five trustees elected a week later and 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 under a state act reorganized the city on October 25, 1866. On March 11, 1869, Tampa voters 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 modern 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.

Tampa went without a flag for 75 years after its 1855 charter. The City Clerk's 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 on July 1, 1930, and a week later McKay formally accepted the flag from Whitney at a board session.

The design reads as a short history lesson. The red, white and blue stand for the United States; red and gold represent Spain, whose exploration of the Tampa Bay area began in 1528; the Union Jack and parts of the crosses of St. Andrew and St. George mark the British period after 1763; and the colors of Italy and France appear for their contributions to Florida. The archives add that 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.

Very large and nearly empty. Hillsborough County says the U.S. Legislative Council for the Territory of Florida organized Hillsborough as Florida's 19th county on January 25, 1834. Its territory then covered what are now Pinellas, Polk, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, DeSoto, Hardee and Highlands counties, most of Glades County and part of Lee County, yet the county counted only 836 residents, not including soldiers or Native Americans. Most of them, the county's anniversary history adds, lived in the village of Tampa.

The name comes from London, not Tampa Bay. The 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 Hillsborough County commissioners met in 1846, the county tax raised $148.69 for the year and commissioners were paid $2 per day while in session. By around 2000 the county had about 1 million residents, and its January 2024 history page put the count at about 1.35 million.

A roadside marker in downtown Tampa records two nights of rock 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 marker was erected in 2019 at North Ashley Drive and East Zack Street.

Another compact history hangs indoors. 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 work holding nearly 200 vignettes, portraits and images. Its border alone contains more than 50 small paintings of things specific to Tampa, among them devil crabs, Cuban bread, citrus, manatees and bananas. The painting hangs in the lobby of the Tampa Municipal Office Building.