May 29 2008
Cotanchobee Park: A 12 part history of Tampa. Part 1
Cotanchobee Park is located behind the Ice Palace St. Pete Times Forum, and is an integral part of Riverwalk. It also has a wall of plaques that give a excellent early history of the Tampa Bay region. (the structure being built in the background is the new History Center.)
Some of the plaques are a little hard to read. In order to get the whole story down, I’ve taken large digital images of the plaques, and will transcribe each along with posting the best picture I can tweak out using GIMP. Here is the first image.
Here is the text.
“The word Tanpa, from which Tampa derives its modern name, was used for hundreds, & perhaps, thousands of years before the coming of Europeans to these shores. It was the name of a nearby Indian village. When the Spaniards arrived, at least by 1513, this lower southwest shoreline was a focus of their explorations. They heard the Natives using this word, & the Spaniards wrote it in their documents. They did not understand it, & no dependable translation survives, but its use today echoes that rich and exciting history. Another way in which the Natives distinguished this area was by its topography. They called it cotan’chobi, a contraction of the phrase cotani chobi,”the big place where the water meets the land.” In English, we write their words “Cotanchobee.” Here, the beautiful river that we know today as the Hillborough sweeps gracefully to it’s wide, deep bay, before merging with the Gulf of Mexico. How many Natives occupied this land before the Europeans found it? We will never know for sure but, certainly, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children lived here or traveled across this rich land. Where you stand now, they passed their lives: they walked, ate, slept, worked, loved & died here. Consider how much this land has meant to all of its inheritors.”
I will be posting one plaque per week along with the text for twelve weeks. I have set up a separate category for these posts so you can view them in completeness.