Manatee County is a county in the U.S. state of Florida. As of the 2020 US Census, the population was 399,710. Manatee County is part of the Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its county seat and largest city is Bradenton. The county was created in 1855 and named for the Florida manatee, Florida's official marine mammal. Features of Manatee County include access to the southern part of the Tampa Bay estuary, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, and the Manatee River.
Sarasota County is a county located in Southwest Florida. At the 2020 US census, the population was 434,006. Its county seat is Sarasota and its largest city is North Port. Sarasota County is part of the North Port–Sarasota–Bradenton, FL metropolitan statistical area.
The Seminole Wars were a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminoles that took place in Florida between about 1816 and 1858. The Seminoles are a Native American nation which coalesced in northern Florida during the early 1700s, when the territory was still a Spanish colonial possession. Tensions grew between the Seminoles and settlers in the newly independent United States in the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into the First Seminole War in 1817, when General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole and Black Seminole towns and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818. The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.
Fort Myers is a city in and the county seat of Lee County, Florida, United States. The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program calculated that the city's population was 92,245 in 2021, ranking the city the 370th-most-populous in the country. Together with the larger and more residential city of Cape Coral, the smaller cities of Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, and Bonita Springs, the village of Estero, and the unincorporated districts of Lehigh Acres and North Fort Myers, it anchors a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) which comprises Lee County and has a population of 787,976 as of 2021.
Bradenton is a city in and the county seat of Manatee County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city's population is 55,698.
Fort Meade is a city in Polk County, Florida, United States. As of 2018, the population recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau is 6,203. It is part of the Lakeland–Winter Haven Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city was named for George Meade, at the time an Army lieutenant serving in Florida following the Second Seminole War. Fort Meade is home to Fort Meade Middle-Senior High School, several historic buildings, and Streamsong resort. The area is popular with kayakers and canoers.
Sanford is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and the county seat of Seminole County. It is located in Central Florida and its population was 61,051 as of the 2020 census.
Osceola, named Billy Powell at birth in Alabama, became an influential leader of the Seminole people in Florida. His mother was Muscogee, and his great-grandfather was a Scotsman, James McQueen. He was reared by his mother in the Creek (Muscogee) tradition. When he was a child, they migrated to Florida with other Red Stick refugees, led by a relative, Peter McQueen, after their group's defeat in 1814 in the Creek Wars. There they became part of what was known as the Seminole people.
The Second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War, was a conflict from 1835 to 1842 in Florida between the United States and groups of people collectively known as Seminoles, consisting of Native Americans and Black Indians. It was part of a series of conflicts called the Seminole Wars. The Second Seminole War, often referred to as the Seminole War, is regarded as "the longest and most costly of the Indian conflicts of the United States". After the Treaty of Payne's Landing in 1832 that called for the Seminole's removal from Florida, tensions rose until fierce hostilities occurred in the Dade battle in 1835. This conflict started the war. The Seminoles and the U.S. forces engaged in mostly small engagements for more than six years. By 1842, only a few hundred native peoples remained in Florida. Although no peace treaty was ever signed, the war was declared over on August 14, 1842.
Prospect Bluff Historic Sites is located in Franklin County, Florida, on the Apalachicola River, 6 miles (9.7 km) SW of Sumatra, Florida. The site contains the ruins of two forts.
David Emanuel Twiggs, born in Georgia, was a career army officer, serving during the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and Mexican–American War.
The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native American and African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or freedmen in the past.
Fort Dallas was a military base during the Seminole Wars on the banks of the Miami River in what is now Downtown Miami, Florida, United States.
This is a timeline of the U.S. state of Florida.
Fort Denaud is a census-designated place (CDP) and former fort in Hendry County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of the CDP was 2,049.
Fort Hamer Bridge is a bridge that spans the Manatee River between Lakewood Ranch and Parrish. It was built in 2015 and completed in 2017 by Johnson Brothers Corporation and was designed by AECOM. The name of the bridge comes from the former fort of the same name that resided nearby the bridge during the Seminole Wars.
Rye is an unincorporated community in Manatee County, Florida.
Fort Scott was built in 1816 on the west bank of the Flint River, where it joins the Chattahoochee River to form the Apalachicola, in the southwest corner of Georgia. It was named for Lieutenant Richard W. Scott, who was killed in the Scott Massacre of 1817 and never known to have visited the fort. The need for a fort became evident during the War of 1812, when the British identified the undefended United States border and in 1814 built two forts on the Apalachicola River into which the Flint River flows: a strong fort at Prospect Bluff and a smaller one, Nicolls' Outpost, at the river juncture. This was in Spanish Florida, but Spain had neither the resources nor the inclination to do anything about the fort in a location that was remote.
Angola was a prosperous community of up to 750 maroons that existed in Florida from 1812 until Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, at which point it was destroyed. The location was along the Manatee River in Bradenton, Florida, near Manatee Mineral Springs Park. The exact location is expansive, ranging from where the Braden River meets the Manatee River down to Sarasota Bay; archaeological research focuses on the Manatee Mineral Spring—a source of fresh water and later the location of the Village of Manatee two decades after the destruction of the maroon community. Archaeological evidence has been found and the archaeology report by Uzi Baram is on file with the Florida Division of Historical Resources of the Florida Department of State.
Fort Gardiner was a stockaded fortification with two blockhouses that was built in 1837 by the United States Army. It was one of the military outposts created during the Second Seminole War to assist Colonel Zachary Taylor's troops to capture Seminole Indians and their allies in the central part of the Florida Territory that were resisting forced removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River per the Indian Removal Act.
