Ice, rails and stilt houses
Commercial fishing on Charlotte Harbor is older than the town. A historical marker at Fishermen's Village says Spanish fishermen first sailed their smacks into the harbor in the 18th century, and that Cuban crews ran the trade for more than two hundred years, until the United States took Florida in 1821 and began claiming its waters.
The turning point came in 1886, when the railroad reached the settlement then called Trabue and an ice factory went up beside it. Fish that once had to be dried or salted could now be packed in ice and sent north fresh. By the 1890s, the marker says, Punta Gorda had one of the largest commercial fishing industries in Florida.
The fish houses moved as the town grew. They started on the Long Dock, shifted in 1897 to the Railroad Dock at the foot of King Street, which is now U.S. 41 North, and moved again in 1928 to the Maud Street Dock. Out on the harbor, fish shacks on stilts served as ice houses and bunkhouses, and small runboats carried fish, ice and fishermen back and forth. At its height the trade handled thousands of tons of fish a year.
As fishing spread down the coast, Punta Gorda's share shrank. The last of the old companies on the Maud Street Dock, the Punta Gorda Fish Company, shut down in the late 1970s and the pier fell into ruin.
From fish dock to Fishermen's Village
The radio broadcaster Earl Nightingale saw the rundown pier and pictured a restaurant at its end. With developer F.M. Donelson and publisher Robert Anderson the idea grew into Fishermen's Village, with shops, restaurants, apartments and a marina. It opened in February 1980, and according to its marker, shrimp boats and mullet fishermen could still be seen at the edge of the complex on opening day.
Sport fishing has its own chapter. On March 26, 1917, more than a thousand people met Theodore Roosevelt at Punta Gorda. He had come to harpoon devil fish, the giant manta rays of the harbor, and on his first day he struck two, one more than twelve feet across. He spent a week on the water, including a day at the bird rookeries near Matlacha.
