From Longbeach to Longboat
Longboat Key is a slim barrier island roughly 10.8 miles long and never more than a mile across, and a county line cuts it in two. When lawmakers carved Sarasota County out of Manatee in July 1921, the north end stayed in Manatee and the south end went to Sarasota. A single town government, the Town of Longboat Key, has run both halves since 1955.
The town's history page says native peoples used the key as a place to fish and feast, and their shell mounds show fish fries were a habit long before settlers arrived. The Longboat Key Historical Society traces the name to the long canoes those tribes paddled.
Settlement started at the north tip. Thomas Mann, a Civil War veteran, received a homestead grant of 144 acres there in 1891, and in 1911 Rufus and Annie Jordan drew up a plat for a community they named Longbeach. Two years later it had a hotel, 16 houses and a dock at the foot of Broadway Street.
Until the Second World War, the Longboat Key Observer writes, most of the island was a quiet fishing village ringed by fruit farms. Residents voted to incorporate on November 14, 1955, taking the name Longboat Key. Building peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and town leaders have held a firm line on height and density ever since.
Skiffs, traps and truck farms
The Historical Society describes homesteaders who fished and farmed the island from the 1880s, and the Observer says fruit farms surrounded the fishing village until the Second World War. A hurricane on October 25, 1921 hit them hard, wrecking docks, the first school, the post office and several homes and damaging the crops.
The water kept people fed. Michael Saunders, whose parents bought land at the north tip in the 1930s, told the Observer that she and her siblings learned early to swim, sail and pull stone crab traps. They drifted the flats in skiffs gigging flounder and mullet, scallops were plentiful, and the catch often landed on the family table that night. Her father turned their cottage into the Land's End marina and restaurant, which opened in 1958 after the north bridge ended the island's isolation.
