A Story of Sarasota/Manatee, Florida's Archaeological Past, Present, and Future.
My family immigrated from Germany to the U.S., but I was born in McGregor, Iowa. I grew up in Baraboo, Wisconsin before moving to Florida. Many centuries before my time, Spanish colonizers came to Florida.
The legends of Hernando de Soto are popular around Sarasota, though mostly fanciful. De Soto National Memorial park commemorates the 1539 landing of those Spanish forces, however the expedition probably landed further north in Tampa Bay.
Those Spaniards only gave us one name for the indigenous people they encountered, "Uzita". It was what a village, or a chief, or both were called at a place north of the Manatee River.
Where the name "Sarasota" came about is a bit of a mystery. One myth comes from a poem. In 1900, George F. Chapline wrote about Sara De Soto, someone who never existed. The poem tells of her love for Chichi-Okobee, also a made-up name.
How anyone believed the nonsense from Chapline is beyond me. Click the button to read the poem we are talking about.
Though fiction, the Chapline poem was enacted in 1917 and launched the Sara de Soto Pageant, by 1947 a week-long event. The curious myth that Sarasota is safe from hurricanes (it is not) grows out of the poem. Though the myth continues, Charles and I saw the results of the 1921 hurricane in Sarasota.
