Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Making an island-hopping day trip and detour to
Dry Tortugas National
History
Calusa and Tequesta peoples plied these waters for thousands of years, but that era came to
a depressingly predictable end with the arrival of the Spanish, the area's first European set-
tlers. Upon finding Native American burial sites, Spanish explorers named Key West Cayo
Hueso (pronounced kah-ya way-so, meaning Bone Island), a title since anglicized into its
current incarnation. From 1760 to 1763, as the Spaniards transferred control of Florida to
Great Britain, all of the islands' indigenous peoples were transferred to Cuba, where they
either died in exile or integrated into the local ethnic mélange.
Key West itself was purchased by John Simonton in 1821, and developed as a naval
base in 1822. For a long while, the area's cycle of boom and bust was tied to the military,
salt manufacturing, lime production (from coral), shipwrecks, and sponges, which were
harvested, dried and turned into their namesake bath product.
In the late 1800s the area became the focus of mass immigration as Cubans fled Spanish
rule and looked to form a revolutionary army. Along with them came cigar manufacturers,
who turned Key West into the USA's cigar-manufacturing center. That would end when
workers' demands convinced several large manufacturers, notably Vicente Martínez Ybor
and Ignacio Haya, to relocate to Tampa in southwest Florida. Immigrants from the Carib-
bean settled in the Keys in this period, and as a result, today's local African Americans
tend to be descended from Bahamian immigrants rather than Southern slaves - something
of a rarity in the US.
During the Spanish-American War (1898), Key West was an important staging point for
US troops, and the military presence lasted through to WWI. In the late 1910s, with Pro-
hibition on the horizon, Key West became a bootlegging center, as people stocked up on
booze. The Keys began to boom around 1938 when Henry Flagler constructed his Over-
seas Hwy, replacing the by-then defunct Overseas Railroad.
Key West has always been a place where people buck trends. A large society of artists
and craftspeople congregated here at the end of the Great Depression because of cheap real
estate, and that community continues to grow (despite today's pricey real estate). While
gay men have long been welcomed, the gay community really picked up in earnest in the
