 |
| John T. Lesley |
His “No Corporation People’s Ticket” won, and
the newly elected officials did not take
office, thereby allowing the city’s 1855 charter to lapse, effectively
eliminating the City of Tampa as a legal municipality. Four years would pass before any sort of
municipal government would take charge in Tampa, but another ten years would go
by before the economic and emotional depression that had gripped Tampa was
replaced by optimism.
Hope did
eventually come to Tampa, and it arrived on steel rails via a steam powered
engine. Henry Plant’s decision to make
Tampa the railhead for his South Florida Railroad, and Tampa Bay a main port
for his steamships, revolutionized the area.
Plant’s arrival in 1883 was the first of three monumental developments
for Tampa in the 1880s. The second
followed two years later when Vicente Martinez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to
open cigar factories just outside of Tampa.
Ybor City would eventually become home to hundreds of cigar factories
and tens of thousands of workers. It was
also around this time that phosphate was discovered in the area’s rivers,
particularly the Hillsborough and Peace, as well as in the ground in eastern
and southern Hillsborough County.
Tampa’s population exploded, from 720 people in 1880 to over 5,500 in 1890. New neighborhoods blossomed with these new arrivals. Preceding Ybor City were Tampa Heights (originally known as North Tampa) and Hyde Park. Together with Ybor City and what is now downtown Tampa, these four areas formed the first four wards of the new City of Tampa, which received its charter from the state on July 15, 1887. Tampa was finally realizing the success that had been anticipated thirty years earlier.
