The early Spanish explorers who made their way to the western coast of Florida, to what is now Pinellas County, came searching for treasure. But they found only primeval forest, which stretched to the Gulf of Mexico, and a slender chain of barrier islands edged with aquamarine water and bone-white sand.
Fortune seekers continued to flock there for centuries afterward, lured by myths of a Shangri-La, but it wasn’t until 1887, when a railway line connected the peninsula to the mainland, that the area finally made good on its long-imagined riches. Tourism and citrus farming gave rise to two major cities, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and by the middle of the twentieth century an influx of retirees and veterans of World War II fueled a population boom.
Subdivisions and strip malls swallowed up the ancient pine forests and orange groves, and Pinellas County became a showy, if despoiled, new world: a patchwork of swimming pools and retention ponds, manicured retirement communities and RV parks, sleek new condos and Easter-egg-hued motels. Rapid change was taking place all across Florida, where the postwar years brought more new residents, development, and commerce than the previous four centuries combined. The pull of the Sunshine State never let up, drawing successive generations of newcomers…