1915 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Chart of Tampa Bay

A 1915 nautical map of Tampa Bay produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a Congressional report. The Corps had undertaken multiple projects in this region in the preceding years which allowed Tampa to ship its economic products (phosphate and cigars, primarily) to distant ports, a major factor in the city's growth.

A Closer Look

The entirety of Tampa Bay is covered along with adjoining waterways, with sounding, keys, lights, buoys, and other navigational features marked throughout. Among them are a hospital and quarantine station on Mullet Key operated by the Marine Hospital Service that was tasked with inspecting foreign nationals arriving in Tampa and quarantining those who were ill (Tampa's population surged in the years before this map's publication as workers from Cuba and elsewhere arrived to work, mostly rolling cigars). On land, Tampa, Port Tampa, Palma Sola, and St. Petersburg are illustrated, while the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and various coastal points are also noted. A diagram at bottom-left indicates the direction and velocity of winds. The present chart is an index to a series of maps, marked out with dashed line boxes, accompanying the same report, the eighth of which (also sold by us) covers Tampa itself and the Seddon Channel.

Engineering Tampa Bay

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers undertook a series of projects near Tampa in the late 19th and early 20th century that helped to ensure the city's later development. Most notably, this included dredging work to deepen and widen Hillsborough Bay ('Hillsboro' in contemporary documents) to allow larger ships to reach Tampa from the Gulf of Mexico. Channels were also dug or widened along the Manatee River and other nearby waterways to facilitate the easy flow of water and allow more direct travel for ships. These efforts paid off handsomely when the Tampa region was discovered (in part by the Corps of Engineers) to be abundant in phosphate, an important ingredient in fertilizers which was shipped from Tampa throughout the country. In the early 19th century, Tampa also became the center of America's cigar industry, similarly requiring robust port facilities to allow for continuous export.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by 'C.F.P.' and produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1914 and 1915. It was printed by Norris Peters as part of a report to Congress titled Harbor at Tampa, Fla. Letter from the Secretary of War, transmitting with a letter from the Chief of Engineers, reports on preliminary examination and survey of harbor at Tampa, Fla. (64th Congress, House Doc. No. 1345). The map itself is not independently cataloged with any institution, while the entire report is held by a handful of institutions, though a precise census is difficult given the intermingling of digital and physical examples and the inconsistent cataloging of the individual report versus the bound collection of all House documents for the 64th Congress.