Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

History

Major Professor

Brian Connolly, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kyle Burke, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Erin Stewart Mauldin, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Christopher Meindl, Ph.D.

Keywords

History, Landscape, Springs Coast, Tampa Bay, Water, West-Central Florida

Abstract

According to an oft-repeated tale, the Florida we know today emerged as a dreamscape of tourism, retirement, and suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century. Growth victimized nature. This dissertation deeply unsettles that story. The history of the Nature Coast exposes not just nature’s agency but its primacy in the development of modern Florida.

Using surveys, maps, census data, personal correspondence, government documents, business records, timber reports, advertising materials, and hydrological research, this dissertation follows time and water across landscapes, into the Upper Floridan Aquifer, and back out again. Each chapter explores a single landscape within the Nature Coast. Officially, the region came into being with a state resolution; unofficially, the Nature Coast was born in the earliest years of Florida’s territorial history. Starting in the 1820s, nature shaped the timing, direction, character, and extent of the region’s growth. Federal legislation, state and federal officials, locals, northern capital, global consumers, progressives, and back-to-nature retirees all wanted nature. But their demands were neither consistent nor simply extractive. Conservation was as much a product of their demands as Big Hammock harvests, red cedars pencil slats, hard rock phosphate fertilizer, limerock, or tidewater cypress timber. Like so much of Florida, the Nature Coast has grown because of nature, not simply in spite of it. This dissertation challenges current framings of modern Florida history, but it also demands a rethinking of Florida regionalism.

Much more than a dreamscape, west-central Florida has long been an unacknowledged springscape, binding together nature and people, water flows and water use. By tracing both water and time, hydrology and history, we see that Tampa Bay and the Nature Coast share both a legacy and a set of possibilities. Far more than just Tampa Bay’s hinterland, the Nature Coast has long been one of its primary water sources. In an era of increasingly polarized positions on growth and nature, this project dismantles the terms of the debate. Many of us want to find common ground—the west-central Florida springscape shows us where to find it.

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