29. Bayport

 The History of Bayport

Bayport has a fascinating and layered history.

Long before I spent my summers there, Native Americans lived in the Bayport area. Evidence of their presence was everywhere if you knew where to look. When wells were dug or canals dredged, Native American artifacts would often be uncovered — pottery shards, arrowheads, and other traces of lives once lived along those waters.

The early white settlers arrived in the 1850s. Bayport became a small but active coastal settlement. There was even a hotel and a thriving little community.

Because of its location on the Gulf, Bayport served as an early commercial shipping point connected to inland settlements.

As children, we were surrounded by this history without fully realizing it.

During the American Civil War, blockade runners operated in the area, moving between Florida and Cuba.There was a place called “the Battery” where we would sit in the shallow water, feeling around with our feet and hands for arrowheads while we waited our turn to water ski. History was literally beneath our feet.

The Battery was a Confederate Cannon Battery site. The Battle of Bayport took place there in April 1863. Union ships attacked the Battery, but were forced to retreat. I found a small piece of a cannon ball nearby.

During Prohibition, the area became known for bootlegging, with liquor smuggled through the coastal waterways.

And during World War II, a radar installation was placed there to help track planes from MacDill Air Force Base.

Yet despite all of this history, Bayport never became large or heavily developed. It remained small and quiet. According to the 2020 census, the population was only forty-five people.

The Bayport I knew from the 1950s onward still felt like a hidden place — part fishing village, part summer playground, part living memory haunted in the best sense — layered with stories and echoes from the past.

Poem

Time moved differently there.

The past never fully disappeared.

Arrowheads beneath the water,

pieces of cannonballs in the sand,

old stories carried on the Gulf wind.

Children playing above history,

never realizing

how many lives had already passed

through the same quiet shores.