History
Anna Maria Island was discovered by local Indian tribes the Timucan and Caloosan American Indian tribes and then by Spanish explorers (including Hernando DeSoto) in the name of the Spanish Crown. Hernando de Soto and his crew entered the mouth of Tampa Bay north of Anna Maria in May, 1539, but passed it by to make their landfall on the mainland.
In 1892 George Emerson Bean became the first permanent resident on the Island and homesteaded much of what is now the City of Anna Maria. After Bean's death in 1898, the land went to his son, George Wilhelm Bean, who partnered with Charles Roser, a wealthy real estate developer from St. Petersburg, to form the Anna Maria Beach Company to develop the area. The company laid out streets, built sidewalks and houses and installed a water system.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
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Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
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“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)