Cedar Key Florida Hotels
Hotels in Cedar Key Florida are often required for tourists who need short term accommodation. Some may want to stay at hotels that have access to scenery and to culture. Some may want to stay at high quality hotels. Some may want to stay hotels that have impressive reviews. Some may want to stay at hotels that have impressive reviews.
Hotels in Cedar Key are often needed for tourists who require a place to stay. Some may want to stay at luxury or cheap hotels. Some may want to stay at hotels that have access to scenery and to culture.
Cedar Key is a city in Levy County, Florida, United States. The Cedar Keys are a cluster of islands close to the mainland. Most of the developed area of the city has been on Way Key since the end of the 19th century. The Cedar Keys are named for the Eastern Red Cedar, Juniperus virginiana, which once grew abundantly in the area.
The Cedar Keys were used by Seminole Indians, by the Spanish as a watering stop for ships returning to Spain from Mexico and by pirates, such as Jean Lafitte and Captain Kidd.
Followers of William Augustus Bowles, self-declared Director General of the State of Muskogee, built a watchtower in the vicinity of Cedar Key in 1801. The tower was destroyed by a Spanish force in 1802.
Indian War
Permanent historic occupation of the islands began in 1839, when the United States Army, led by General Zachary Taylor, established Fort No. 4, which served as a depot and included a hospital, on Depot Key (later known as Atsena Otie Key) during the Second Seminole War. This became the headquarters of the Army of the South. Cantonment Morgan was established on nearby Seahorse Key late in the war and used as a troop deployment station and as a holding station for Seminoles who had been captured or who had surrendered until they could be sent to the West. A hurricane with a twenty-seven foot storm surge struck the Cedar Keys on October 4, 1842, destroying Cantonment Morgan and causing much damage on Depot Key. Some Seminole leaders had been meeting with Army officers at Depot Key to negotiate their surrender or a retreat to a reservation in the Everglades. After the hurricane, the Seminoles refused to return to the area. Colonel William J. Worth had declared the war to be over in August 1842, and Depot Key was abandoned by the Army after the hurricane.
Pre-Civil War
In 1842 the United States Congress had enacted the Armed Occupation Act, a precursor of the Homestead Act, to increase white settlement in Florida as a way of forcing the Seminoles to leave the territory. With the abandonment of the Army base on depot key, the Cedar Keys became available for settlement under the act. Under the terms of the act, several people received permits for settlement on Depot Key, Way Key and Scale Key. Augustus Steele, USA Customs House Officer for Hillsborough County, Florida and postmaster for Tampa Bay, received the permit for Depot Key, which he then renamed Atsena Otie Key. In 1843 he bought the buildings on the island, and built some cottages for wealthy guests. In 1844 he became the Collector of Customs for the port of Cedar Key as well as for Tampa, Florida. A post office named Cedar Key was established on Atsena Otie Key in 1845. The Florida legislature chartered the City of Atseena Otie in 1859.
Cedar Key quickly became an important port, shipping lumber and naval stores harvested on the mainland. By 1860 two mills on Atsena Otie Key were producing 'cedar' slats for shipment to northern pencil factories. As a result of the growth, the USA Congress appropriated money for a lighthouse on Seahorse Key in 1850. The Cedar Key Light was completed in 1854. The lighthouse lantern is 28 feet above the ground, but the lighthouse sits on a 47 foot high hill, putting the light 75 feet above sea level. The light was visible for 16 miles. Wood-frame residences were added to each side of the lighthouse several years later.
In 1860 Cedar Key became the western terminus of the Florida Railroad, connecting it to Fernandina on the east coast of Florida. David Levy Yulee, U.S. Senator and President of the Florida Railroad, had acquired most of Way Key to house the railroad's terminal facilities. A town was platted on Way Key in 1859, and Parsons and Hale's General Store, which is now the Island Hotel, was built there in the same year. On March 1, 1861, the first train arrived in Cedar Key, just weeks before the beginning of the Civil War.
Civil War years
With the advent of the American Civil War in 1861, Confederate agents extinguished the light at Seahorse Key and removed its supply of sperm oil. The USS Hatteras raided Cedar Key in January 1862, burning several ships loaded with cotton and turpentine and destroying the railroad's rolling stock and buildings on Way Key. Most of the Confederate troops guarding Cedar Key had been sent to Fernandina in anticipation of a Federal attack there. Cedar Key was an important source of salt for the Confederacy during the early part of the war. In October 1862 a Union raid destroyed sixty kettles on Salt Key (Spanish: Placer de los Roques) capable of producing 150 bushels of salt a day. The Union occupied the Cedar Keys in early 1864, staying for the remainder of the war.
Post Civil War
In 1865 the Eberhard Faber mill was built on Atsena Otie Key. The Eagle Pencil Company mill was built on Way Key, and Way Key, with its railroad terminal, passed Atsena Otie Key in population. Repairs to the Florida Railroad were completed in 1868 and freight and passenger traffic again flowed into Cedar Key. The "Town of Cedar Keys" was incorporated in 1869, and had a population of 400 in 1870.
Early in his career as a naturalist, John Muir walked 1,000 miles (1,609 km) from Louisville, Kentucky to Cedar Key in just two months in 1867. Muir contracted malaria while working in a sawmill in Cedar Key, and was nursed back to health in the house of the mill's superintendent. Muir recovered enough to sail from Cedar Key to Cuba in January 1868. He recorded his impressions of Cedar Key in his memoir, A thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, which was published in 1916, after his death.
After the war, Henry Plant considered extending the Charleston and Savannah Railroad to Cedar Key, but he couldn’t reach an acceptable agreement with the town and decided to use Tampa as his Florida terminus. This sealed the fate of Cedar Key. When Plant's railroad to Tampa began service in 1886, the larger, deep-water port took shipping away from Cedar Key and the city began to decline. The once-thriving lumber industry had already begun to falter because most of the trees had been harvested. By 1890, timber and seafood resources in the Cedar Key area were depleted.
The fourth storm of the 1896 Atlantic hurricane season was the final blow. At approximately 4 a.m. on September 29, 1896, a 10 foot storm surge swept over the town, killing more than 100 people. Winds north of town were estimated at 125 mph, which would classify it as a category 3. The hurricane wiped out the juniper trees still standing and destroyed all the mills. The factories were never rebuilt and twenty-five hundred jobs were lost. As if that wasn't enough, a fire on December 2, 1896 destroyed half of the business district. Over the next 10-15 years, the island of Atsena Otie Key was abandoned and structures were rebuilt on Way Key, a more protected island inland, but the damage was done. Today, there are a few remnants of the original town on Atsena Otie Key, including stone water cisterns, and a graveyard whose headstones conspicuously date prior to 1896. There are also many of the juniper (Juniperus virginiana subsp. silicicola) trees that originally attracted the pencil company. These were misidentified as cedars by early settlers, hence the name Cedar Key.
At the start of the twentieth century, fishing, sponge hooking and oystering had become the major industries, but around 1909, the oyster beds were exhausted. By 1913, ships ceased to use the port at Cedar Key, and the town never recovered, either as a port or as an industrial area. President Herbert Hoover established the Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge in 1929 by naming three of the islands as a breeding ground for colonial birds.
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