The modern town arrived by rail and resort: Peter Demens’ Orange Belt Railroad reached the bluff in 1888, Clearwater incorporated in 1891 with James E. Crane as first mayor, and in 1897 Henry B. Plant opened the Belleview Biltmore — the vast wood-frame Victorian resort they called the White Queen of the Gulf, which stood until 2015. On May 27, 1915, Clearwater reincorporated as a city and became the seat of brand-new Pinellas County, and within a year the first bridge reached across the harbor to the barrier island.
The deep story starts with the Tocobaga — the shell-mound people of Tampa Bay, who built their villages on the water and knew every spring on the coast. Spanish expeditions crossed the region early — Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528, Hernando de Soto in 1539 — and in the centuries that followed, European disease and raids devastated the Tocobaga, who were gone from the bay by the early 1700s; the Indigenous peoples of Tampa Bay remain part of this coast’s story. Fort Harrison went up on the bluff in April 1841 during the Seminole Wars, the 1842 Armed Occupation Act brought American settlers, and Odet Philippe planted Florida’s first citrus groves nearby in the 1830s — a pioneer of the orange coast who was also, the record shows, a slaveholder, like a number of settlers of that era.
Why People Visit Clearwater Florida
- Spend a day on Clearwater Beach, the three-mile white-sand barrier-island beach repeatedly ranked among the top beaches in America — calm, shallow Gulf water, long flat sand, sunsets straight across the Gulf horizon.
- Walk out on Pier 60, the 1962 fishing-and-sunset pier on Clearwater Beach where the daily sunset celebration has been a Clearwater tradition for decades — artisans, musicians, and the green-flash crowd every clear evening.
- Drive or walk the Clearwater Memorial Causeway (FL-60) — the 1915-16 bridge alignment that first connected the mainland to the barrier-island beach, now the high-arc causeway with the harbor on both sides.
- Visit the Clearwater Marine Aquarium on the Clearwater Memorial Causeway — a marine-mammal rehabilitation and rescue center caring for dolphins, sea turtles, otters, and stranded marine wildlife from the Gulf coast.
- Watch a Major League Baseball spring training game in February or March at the Phillies' Clearwater spring-training camp — one of the longest team-city affiliations in the major leagues, going on since 1947.
- Drive south to Sand Key, the lower barrier island just past Clearwater Beach, for the wider stretches of sand at Sand Key Park and the quieter end of the barrier-island chain.
- Walk the downtown Clearwater waterfront at Coachman Park along Clearwater Harbor — the redeveloped 2023 waterfront park with The Sound amphitheater, walking paths, and harbor views across to the beach.
- Stroll Cleveland Street, the downtown corridor on the bluff above the harbor with public art and the historic streetscape.
- Drive twenty minutes east to Heritage Village in Largo, the 21-acre Pinellas County living history museum with 33 historic structures dating from the 1840s — log cabins, the oldest house in Pinellas County, a country store, a train station, a sponge warehouse, and the McKay Creek Boat Shop.
- Visit the McKay Creek Boat Shop exhibit at Heritage Village for the Clark Mills Optimist Pram story — the 1947 design that has carried 400,000 children onto the water in 120 countries, with original Mills-built Optimist Prams, his Snipe sailboat Honey, the Sun Cat, and the Windmill on display.
- Look for the historic Belleview Inn (the surviving preserved portion of the 1897 Henry B. Plant Belleview Biltmore Hotel, demolished 2015) — the last fragment of one of Florida's great Gilded Age resort hotels.
- Catch sunset from Pier 60 or anywhere on the west-facing Gulf side of the barrier island — the longest unbroken horizon line on the central Florida Gulf Coast, on one of the sunniest shorelines in America.
