Why go
The city’s river setting supports a visit that combines different kinds of collections. Tampa Museum of Art presents changing exhibitions, while the Henry B. Plant Museum uses furnished Gilded Age rooms in a former hotel to explain a different period. Tampa’s nineteenth-century growth adds context to those interiors and the wider bay landscape.
What to look for
- Henry B. Plant Museum preserves furnished Gilded Age rooms in a former hotel.
- Tampa Museum of Art presents changing gallery exhibitions.
The full story
Tampa Bay’s shores were home to Indigenous peoples of the Safety Harbor culture, including the Tocobaga and Pohoy. Spanish exploration in the sixteenth century brought violent conflict and European diseases. Spain claimed Florida but did not establish a colony in the Tampa area. In 1824, the US Army built Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, near the site of the Tampa Convention Center. Civilian settlement grew around the outpost, and the village was incorporated as Tampa in 1849. Its early growth remained slow. The pace changed in the 1880s as railroad connections, phosphate discoveries and the cigar industry brought new development. The furnished rooms of the Henry B. Plant Museum provide a way to consider that era’s wealth and ambitions. The river mouth also remains a useful geographic reference for understanding where the nineteenth-century town began.
Useful to know
- Pair an art exhibition with the Plant Museum for contrasting collection visits.