William Whitaker (pioneer)

William Whitaker (pioneer)

William Henry Whitaker (1821 - 1888) was an American Seminole War veteran and pioneer who, under the provisions of the Armed Occupation Act, established the first permanent settlement in what is now Sarasota, Florida. There he traded mullet with Cubans to bring the first groves of economically important oranges to the state. He later married Mary Jane Wyatt and with her raised Nancy Whitaker, the first child recorded in the new county of Sarasota. His father-in-law, William Wyatt, was a constitutional delegate who helped to originate, and signed, Florida's first constitution. At the end of the Civil War he helped Judah P. Benjamin escape to London.

Whitaker was an eighth-generation descendant of Jabez Whitaker, brother of Alexander Whitaker, the Jamestown colonist and theologian who baptized and performed the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe.