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.
Read more about this topic: Anna Maria Island
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... in America ... 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)