The Calusa people had a settlement on Tampa Bay when the first Europeans arrived in the 1520s. Traversing the region while on quests for gold were expeditions led by the Spanish soldier Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and the explorer Hernando de Soto in 1539. However, the site of present-day Tampa was not settled by whites until 1823 when a plantation was established. Fort Brooke was built the following year to protect the new settlement and encouraged its growth. Tampa incorporated as a city in 1855. Confederate forces occupied Fort Brooke at the start of the American Civil War, but surrendered it to Union troops in May 1864.
Growth of the community was propelled by the discovery in 1883 of phosphates, used to make fertilizer, about 50 km (about 30 mi) inland around Lakeland. In 1884 a railroad reached the city, financed by Georgia industrialist Henry B. Plant, who also inaugurated tourism to the area with construction of the Tampa Bay Hotel. Vicente Ybor founded the cigar-making industry in 1886 in a neighborhood northeast of central Tampa; that community soon was renamed Ybor City and became the nation's leading center of cigar manufacturing as thousands labored to roll cigars from Cuban tobaccos. While the district still manufactures some cigars, today it is better known as a lively historic district. Tampa was an army training camp during the Spanish-American War in 1898; Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders used the city as an embarkation point for Cuba, where they launched the celebrated charge at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Thousands were drawn to the Tampa region by intense real-estate promotions in the 1920s. A shipbuilding industry prospered as the nation equipped to fight world wars in the first half of the 20th century. In 1953 Tampa annexed a number of inner suburbs, gaining sizable new area and population.
