The Great Gulf Divorce: How Pinellas Walked Out on Hillsborough in 1912

By Joe Marzo

It took a two day buggy ride to reach the in laws, the bills kept piling up, and not one of those bills ever seemed to come back as a paved road. By the early 1910s, the residents of the Pinellas Peninsula had had enough. After roughly seventy seven years of marriage to Hillsborough County, they wanted out, and they wanted the house, the kids, and the silverware too.

This is the story of how a Florida peninsula filed for divorce, won, and then promptly started another fight with itself.

A Marriage of Convenience (1834)

When the Florida Territorial Legislative Council carved Hillsborough County out of the wilderness in 1834, it was an enormous, unwieldy thing, sprawling across most of the state's west central coast. The Pinellas Peninsula, a finger of pine and palmetto poking into the Gulf, was simply tacked on and unofficially called “West Hillsborough.” Tampa, on the eastern shore of the bay, was the county seat. Pinellas was the spare bedroom.

For a frontier county where almost nobody lived, this arrangement worked fine. The peninsula's first permanent non native resident, a French Huguenot named Odet Philippe, didn't even arrive until 1835. He planted Florida's first citrus grove and brought cigar making with him, which, in retrospect, was an early sign that Pinellas had its own ideas about what to do with its land. The U.S. Army built Fort Harrison on a bluff overlooking Clear Water Harbor as a rest post for soldiers during the Second Seminole War. Cattle wandered the pine flats. Mosquitoes ruled the rest.

For most of the nineteenth century, almost nothing about this geography mattered politically. There simply weren't enough people on the peninsula for anyone in Tampa to worry about, and there weren't enough people in Tampa for anyone on the peninsula to resent.

That changed quickly.

The Honeymoon Ends

The peninsula has a particular geography that mattered enormously in the age before bridges. Surrounded by water on three sides and connected to the mainland only by a narrow neck of land, getting from southern Pinellas to the courthouse in Tampa was an overnight affair. You could see Tampa across the water; you just couldn't easily get there. The few automobiles on the peninsula in the early 1900s had a habit of bogging down in the muck after every rainstorm. Tampa Bay sat in the way like a moat that ran the wrong direction.

That mattered less when Pinellas had a few hundred residents and a lot of cattle. It mattered a great deal once the peninsula started to fill up. Tarpon Springs incorporated in 1887, becoming the first official city on the peninsula. The Orange Belt Railway pushed south the next year, and at its terminus a Russian born railroad man named Peter Demens named the new town after his hometown: St. Petersburg. Clearwater incorporated in 1891, St. Petersburg in 1892, Dunedin in 1899, Largo in 1905. Citrus was booming. Tourists were arriving on the trains. Real estate was beginning the strange, feverish dance it has been doing in Florida ever since.

And the tax dollars were flowing east across the bay, toward Tampa, and almost nothing was flowing back. Roads on the peninsula were terrible or simply nonexistent. Schools were under resourced. Petitions for improvements went unanswered, in part because Hillsborough's commissioners had Tampa's own boom to manage and didn't see why their attention should be dragged across the water. To peninsula residents, it began to feel like taxation without representation, only with worse weather.

There was even a newspaper that had crossed over to take their side. In 1894, a paper called the Hillsborough Times had picked up and moved from Clearwater to the burgeoning new town to the south, where it was renamed The St. Petersburg Times. It would, over the next two decades, become one of the loudest voices for the peninsula breaking away.

The 1907 Declaration of Independence

The first serious shot came in 1907, when peninsula civic leaders drew up what they pointedly called a “Declaration of Independence” from Hillsborough County. It was a calculated piece of political theater, with all the historical resonance the name implied. The document didn't carry legal weight, but it set the agenda. From that point on, the question was no longer whether Pinellas would seek to split off, but when, and on what terms.

Newspapers carried the cause. The St. Petersburg Times, under editor J.A. Armistead, made the argument in print, week after week. Another local figure, William L. Straub, also put his weight behind the cause and would later be remembered as one of the architects of separation. Public meetings filled halls in Largo and Clearwater and St. Petersburg. Petitions made the rounds. Speakers worked their way through the same set of grievances, polished into a litany: we pay the taxes, our roads are dirt, our schools are starving, our courts are across an entire bay, and the men who run our lives don't even live in our county.

The argument was straightforward and, in a populist sense, unanswerable: we pay the taxes, we should govern ourselves.

The Bill That Did the Deed

The pitch landed in Tallahassee. By 1910 and 1911 the political math had finally tipped in favor of separation, and on May 23, 1911, Governor Albert Gilchrist signed the bill that authorized the peninsula to break away. The bill named Clearwater as the new county's seat, a decision that would matter enormously within months.

A local referendum followed on November 14, 1911. Pinellas residents approved the split by nearly three to one, a margin that left no room to argue the verdict. On January 1, 1912, the new county officially came into being. It was Florida's 48th, taking its name from the old Spanish phrase Punta Pinal, meaning “point of pines,” a label the early Spanish navigators had pinned on the entrance to Tampa Bay.

The peninsula was free. The marriage was over. And almost immediately, the children started fighting over the furniture.

The Courthouse War

Newly independent counties usually settle on their largest city as the county seat. By that rule, St. Petersburg, already the bigger city, should have won. But Clearwater sat closer to the geographic middle, and the legislation that created the county had named Clearwater as the county seat. St. Petersburg, in a moment of misplaced trust it would soon regret, agreed to let Clearwater hold the title temporarily, until a proper courthouse could be constructed. The understanding, on the southern side of the peninsula, was that “proper courthouse” meant a real one, eventually, in St. Petersburg.

Clearwater took one look at the word “temporarily” and decided to make it permanent.

There was a useful piece of Florida law on the books at the time. Once a courthouse had been constructed in a county seat, no election to relocate the county seat could be held for twenty years. Clearwater's leaders looked at that law and saw an opportunity. If they could get a courthouse, any courthouse, built quickly, the issue would be settled for a generation.

The first county commission was controlled by north Pinellas members. On May 7, 1912, the commission voted 3 to 2 to build a courthouse in Clearwater. They hired a contractor from, of all places, Tampa, a man named E. W. Parker, and gave him a deadline that bordered on theatrical: thirty days. The price tag was $3,750. The site was a parcel donated by the City of Clearwater, on lots where Peace Memorial Presbyterian Church now stands.

What happened next reads more like a barn raising than a public works project.

When St. Petersburg's leaders realized what was happening, they tried to stop the construction in court. Legal motions were filed. The legal motions failed. With law not working, rumors began to circulate that less legal methods might be tried. According to family accounts passed down by descendants of the Coachman family, word reached Clearwater that a “drunken mob” from St. Petersburg might be coming north to burn the unfinished courthouse to the ground before it could be completed.

Clearwater's response was immediate and frontier flavored. The men of the town fetched their hunting rifles. Volunteer crews worked in shifts around the clock. Lumber was numbered ahead of time so boards could go up in the right order even at night. Women from the surrounding neighborhoods carried coffee, sandwiches, and full meals to the construction site. Torches blazed around the building so the work could continue after sundown. Armed guards with shotguns patrolled the perimeter, day and night, watching for the rumored mob.

The mob never came. The thirty day contract was completed in roughly ten days. The courthouse stood, a humble two story frame building, but standing, and that was the only thing that mattered.

The twenty year clock had started.

The Aftermath

For four years, that cheap wooden building served as the seat of Pinellas County government. In 1916, county residents voted to issue $160,000 in bonds to build a real courthouse and a jail in Clearwater, finally giving the new county a proper home. A year after that, in 1917, the Florida Supreme Court was dragged in to settle the lingering county seat dispute once and for all. The court ruled for Clearwater. The matter was closed.

S.S. Coachman, a successful Clearwater merchant, was elected the first chairman of the new County Commission. The five story Coachman Building he later built in downtown Clearwater still stands today. Its elevator operator, a young man named Joseph Hatchett, would go on to become one of Florida's first Black lawyers and, eventually, a justice of the Florida Supreme Court. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office was founded in 1912 along with the county itself. A new institution, in a new county, with a brand new identity.

What the Divorce Built

The split turned out to be one of the more consequential political acts in Florida's history. Freed from Tampa's gravitational pull, Pinellas spent the next century becoming something genuinely distinct.

Two years after independence, on January 1, 1914, a young pilot named Tony Jannus took off from St. Petersburg, skimmed across Tampa Bay, and landed in Tampa about twenty minutes later. It was the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight, and it covered, in a single hop, a journey that had taken the founders of Pinellas County two days by buggy. The St. Petersburg concert venue Jannus Live still bears his name. There is a poetic justice in the fact that the first commercial airline flight in human history was, essentially, a trip back to the in laws.

The Gandy Bridge opened in 1924, slicing the driving distance between St. Petersburg and Tampa from forty three miles to nineteen. At the time, it was the longest automobile toll bridge in the world. The Davis Causeway followed in 1934, connecting Clearwater more directly to Tampa. The Sunshine Skyway came in 1954, linking Pinellas to Manatee County to the south. Each bridge was, in a sense, a small reconciliation: the peninsula could now afford to be friendly with Tampa precisely because it no longer had to be governed by it.

St. Petersburg grew into a city of museums and waterfronts, home today to the Salvador Dalí Museum, the Chihuly Collection, and a downtown that has been reinventing itself for decades. Clearwater anchored county government and built one of the most photographed beaches in the country. The county's geography of long thin barrier islands, sleepy bays, and pine flats slowly filled in. In 1964, Pinellas became the first county in Florida to adopt a Commission Administrator form of government, an innovation that other counties have copied since.

Today Pinellas is the most densely populated county in Florida, with more than 950,000 residents packed into 280 square miles, ringed by 588 miles of coastline. It is home to two professional sports franchises, two international airports, three colleges, and an unreasonable number of award winning beaches. The county is, in almost every measurable sense, no longer the spare bedroom.

The Rivalry That Remains

The Tampa to St. Pete rivalry that survives today, the friendly potshots, the baseball arguments, the perpetual debate about which side of the bay has the better skyline and the better breakfast spots, is not a coincidence. It is a hundred and thirteen year old echo. When Tampa Bay sports fans argue about whether the Rays should ever consider moving across the water, they are, whether they know it or not, replaying an argument from 1911.

There is something almost touching about the idea of a county born out of being ignored, that grew up to become so successful it now ignores the place that ignored it. The shotgun guards on the courthouse in 1912 were protecting more than a building. They were protecting a stubborn idea that the people who live somewhere ought to be the ones deciding how it gets run.

Some divorces end in distance. This one ended in two cities that just barely tolerate each other across a beautiful bay, connected by bridges, separated by history, and still, quietly and stubbornly, keeping score.