Tampa Riverwalk Historical Monument Trail — Tampa, Florida

The Historical Monument Trail is a series of bronze and marble busts and monuments set along the Tampa Riverwalk beside the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa. According to Friends of the Riverwalk, the nonprofit that runs the program, it tells the story of people and events that shaped the history of Tampa and Hillsborough County, and there are a total of thirty honorees that were designated from 2012 through 2017. The Friends selected those names in collaboration with the Tampa Bay History Center.

The City of Tampa treats the busts as part of the public art of the waterfront. Its Art Programs Division notes that all along the 2.4 miles of Riverwalk, visitors will also encounter several bronze busts along the path, and it names the Historical Monument Trail as the collection that tells this story. The City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department lists the Monument Trail among the Riverwalk features, next to parks such as Cotanchobee Park, Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park and Water Works Park.

Unlike the Tampa Riverwalk as a whole, which is a linear park and transportation corridor, the trail is a curated roll of names. Its honorees run from the mound builders who lived on Hillsborough Bay long before Fort Brooke, through the railroad and cigar era of the 1880s, to the civil rights leaders of Central Avenue and West Tampa in the twentieth century.

Mayor Bob Buckhorn announced the trail in March 2012. 83 Degrees Media reported on March 13, 2012, that the program would feature a variety of bronze and solid granite statues and monuments placed along the Riverwalk on the Hillsborough River, with roughly six or seven Tampa Bay figures honored each year and more than 30 planned in total.

The first class, announced in 2012, was the mound-building Indians, Henry Bradley Plant, James McKay, Eleanor McWilliams Chamberlain, Vicente Martinez-Ybor and Clara Frye. On December 3, 2013, Bay News 9 reported that six more monuments were unveiled on the Tampa Riverwalk, honoring C. Blythe Andrews, Cody Fowler, Kate Jackson, Peter O. Knight, Paulina Pedroso and Garfield Devoe Rogers, and that ultimately more than 30 monuments will line the length of the Riverwalk.

The same month, 83 Degrees Media described how the Tampa program was organized: a 9-member committee makes selections each year looking back over 150 years of Tampa history, and it costs about $120,000 annually to finish and install the busts. Most of that money was privately donated, and Hillsborough County provided a matching grant based on the historical preservation mission of the project.

A third class of six was unveiled in December 2014 in a ceremony outside the Tampa Convention Center, which about 200 people attended, according to 83 Degrees Media: Blanche Armwood, Herman Glogowski, Gavino Gutierrez, Bena Wolf Maas, Hugh Campbell Macfarlane and Moses White. Later Tampa honorees included Merobe Hooker Crane, whose monument dates from 2016, and the roster reached thirty by 2017.

The oldest subject on the trail is not a person but a people. The mound builders monument records that a group called the Mocoso lived on Hillsborough Bay between the Hillsborough River and the Alafia River, in territory that included what is now downtown Tampa, and that one exceptionally tall mound stood at the southern edge of Fort Brooke.

Several busts mark the men who built the nineteenth century town. James McKay, Sr. built a downtown courthouse in 1847 and a steam sawmill on the Hillsborough River in 1851, and served as mayor of Tampa in 1859 and 1860. Henry Bradley Plant brought the South Florida Railroad into Tampa on January 4, 1884, extended it to Port Tampa, and broke ground on the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1888.

The cigar industry has its own cluster of monuments. The Gavino Gutierrez biography credits him with scouting Tampa in November 1884 and surveying the land east of town that would become Ybor City. Vicente Martinez-Ybor moved his cigar operation to Tampa in 1886, and the day after his death on December 14, 1896, all businesses in Tampa closed in honor of his funeral. Across the river, Hugh Campbell Macfarlane served as the first City Attorney of the re-incorporated City of Tampa from 1887 to 1890, platted land opposite downtown, and saw the Florida Legislature create West Tampa on May 18, 1895.

The Herman Glogowski monument honors a four-term mayor of Tampa and its first Jewish mayor. During his first term the Tampa Fire Department was organized, and in July 1888 he laid the cornerstone of the Tampa Bay Hotel, the building that now houses the Henry B. Plant Museum on the University of Tampa campus across the Hillsborough River from the Riverwalk.

Stephen M. Sparkman represented Tampa in the US House from 1895 to 1917. His trail biography credits him with federal money for deep-water channels from Port Tampa to Channelside, work that also created new landmasses, including modern Harbour Island. Peter O. Knight served as state attorney for Hillsborough County from 1893 to 1899 and as president of Tampa Electric Company from 1924 to 1946.

The trail also reaches beyond city government. Ossian Bingley Hart, who lived and practiced law in Tampa, was the tenth governor of the state of Florida but the first to have been born in Florida. Elizabeth Dortsch Barnard became the top postal official in Tampa in 1923, and under her ten-year tenure sixteen new postal sub-stations were created in the city while the number of letter carriers rose from 19 to 113.

Women make up a substantial share of the Tampa roll. Eleanor McWilliams Chamberlain settled in Tampa in 1883 and organized a local suffrage society in 1893; Tampa women then hosted the organizational meeting of the first statewide suffrage group in January 1895, which elected her president. Kate Jackson founded the Tampa Civic Association, which the trail credits with pushing for the first city water and sewage system, the first library and city recreation facilities.

Blanche Armwood was born in Hillsborough County in 1890, graduated from Spelman Seminary in Atlanta in 1906, and by age 18 was principal of the Cottage Hill primary school on the edge of Ybor City; Armwood High School carries her name. Paulina Pedroso, a Cuban independence organizer who worked with Jose Marti in Ybor City, was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1993, according to the Friends of the Riverwalk trail page.

Twentieth century leaders round out the roll. Victoriano Manteiga, who arrived in Tampa in 1914 and read aloud to workers as a lector in a West Tampa cigar factory, founded La Gaceta in 1922. Moses White served on the Tampa Bi-Racial Committee and promoted the 1969 Florida A&M University and University of Tampa football game, the first contest in the state between a historically black college and a predominantly white university.

The monuments were installed while the Tampa Riverwalk itself was still being finished. In December 2014, 83 Degrees Media reported that the Riverwalk was complete from MacDill Park to Water Works Park, with the last major downtown link under Kennedy Boulevard expected in early 2015. The trail therefore grew in step with the corridor that connects the Tampa Convention Center, Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park and the Tampa Museum of Art.

Because the busts are spread along the waterfront rather than gathered in one plaza, the Tampa trail works as an outdoor index to the city: a monument to a Port Tampa congressman, one to a West Tampa founder and one to an Ybor City manufacturer may stand within a short walk of each other on the Hillsborough River. Friends of the Riverwalk describes the trail as an educational tool for children and adults, and states that more Tampa and Hillsborough County names may be added in the future.