Articles on the history of Mullet Key and Fort De Soto, and on the events around the island, old and modern. Each piece is sourced from the record.
Decades after Mullet Key trained pilots for war, the Army Corps of Engineers came back to find out what was left behind.
The fort is called De Soto, but the man it's named for spent only a few weeks at Tampa Bay in 1539 before marching off to four years of slaughter and his own lonely death.
Before it held a fort or a lighthouse keeper, Egmont Key held captives. The Seminole people have their own names for what happened here.
A Hollywood star, a big band, a beauty pageant, and a chalice of Wyoming dirt: how Pinellas County threw open the gates of Fort De Soto in 1963.
On December 21, 1962, two things happened at once: Fort De Soto became a park, and a new causeway ended forever the isolation that had defined Mullet Key for centuries.
After the Army left, the empty fort on Egmont Key found a second life as a rum-runner's hideout, until federal agents burned it to the ground.