Fort Walton Beach, Florida
N 30° 24.306 W 086° 37.209
16R E 536486 N 3363736
Quick Description: City Hall of Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
Location: Florida, United States
Date Posted: 1/6/2008 1:26:53 PM
Waymark Code: WM2XPV
Views: 75
Long Description:From the Fort Walton Beach web site:
The City of Fort Walton Beach, home to approximately 22,000
people, was first created and chartered as a municipality in 1937.
Though Fort Walton Beach is a relatively young city, its history
actually goes back thousands of years.
There is evidence from radioactive dating of artifacts back to
10,000 B.C., and archeological evidence of five distinct Indian
periods between 600 - 1650 A.D. There were pirates, the most
notorious being Billy Bowlegs between 1500 - 1800, and there was a
Civil War encampment. In the early days Fort Walton was known both
as Brooks Landing when John Thomas Brooks and his family settled
here in 1868 and Camp Walton for the Civil War encampment by the
Walton Guards. It was renamed Fort Walton when a Civil War cannon
was discovered in 1932 and excavated from an Indian mound in the
present downtown area on Santa Rosa Sound.
Tourists, resort hotels, and the waterfront have been a part of
Fort Walton Beach since its earliest days. Tourists came from the
North, Midwest, and Southeast to spend months at a time at several
of these full-service, American plan hotels on the shores of the
Santa Rosa Sound. Dancing nightly in an over-the-water pavilion
(where Fort Walton Landing is today), taking a water taxi from the
hotel docks back and forth across the Sound to the beach,
chartering fishing trips in the gulf and bay, receiving ice and
mail by boat from Pensacola, and shopping in stores built over the
water, visitors and locals alike enjoyed the relaxed lifestyle for
which Fort Walton was famous.