Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples—or an all-but deserted beach under the star-spangled dome of heaven, echoing with the endless music of waves breaking on shore.
Whatever your religious affiliation and whatever kind of worship experience you prefer, you’ll more than likely find others who share your faith here in the Tampa Bay area.
In the History chapter, we noted that people lived here and had a history even before the histories were written down. In the same way, people here most likely had religious beliefs even before there were organized churches and synagogues, mosques and temples.
Not counting the religion of the Tocobagans or attempts by the Spanish to establish missions in the Tampa Bay area in the 1500s, the first organized church here was a Methodist congregation in Tampa.
In 1846, the Reverend John C. Ley, of the Georgia-Florida Methodist Conference, rode into town after working his way down the Florida peninsula, preaching where anyone would listen, and staying with settlers where he found them.
Ley didn’t waste any time once he reached Tampa. His diary indicates he opened a church in an already existing building made of salvaged lumber, organized a congregation, and appointed a class leader soon after arriving. Called Church by the Sea, the building was destroyed in the 1848 hurricane. In 1852, the congregation built the area’s first building intended for use as a church.
By then, a Baptist congregation had organized and soon built a church.
Reverend Edmond (sometimes spelled Edmund) Lee, a Presbyterian preacher who owned a general store in Manatee, poled his rowboat up the shoreline from Manatee to Tampa, and preached there beginning in 1854.
In 1860, St. Louis Catholic Church in Tampa was officially constituted, a part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine. The church was named partly in honor of Father Luis Cancer de Barbastro, the priest martyred in Tampa Bay in 1549. In 1888, the parish had three pastors die in succession during a yellow fever epidemic, and Jesuits from New Orleans came to take over the church.
In 1898, ground was broken for a new church to be built on the site of St. Louis Catholic Church. The church was dedicated in 1905 and renamed Sacred Heart Church.
On the other side of Tampa Bay, the Reverend Joseph Brown, a Virginian, arrived in Clearwater Harbor and began preaching in 1868. By 1871, the group there had organized today’s First Presbyterian Church of Dunedin.
Episcopalians have had an official presence in the Tampa Bay area since at least the late 1880s. In 1887, English immigrants built St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in southwest St. Petersburg. About the same time, another group of Episcopalians was organizing what would become the Church of the Ascension in Clearwater.
People of the Jewish faith have been a part of Florida’s earliest years. The first person of Jewish ancestry elected to the United States Congress was Senator David Levy Yulee, elected in 1845 when Florida became a state. (See Parks and Recreation chapter to learn more about where Yulee lived.) His father, Moses Elias Levy was Florida’s first Education Commissioner.
Herman Goglowski, also of the Jewish faith, served as mayor of Tampa, not once, but four different times beginning in 1866.
The first Jewish congregation in the Tampa Bay area, however, did not form until 1894. Congregation Schaarai Zedek still meets today, as do congregations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and Traditional practices of Judaism.
The Jewish experience in the Tampa Bay area has not always been positive. Especially in the years right after the Civil War and again in the 1920s, both times of active Ku Klux Klan activity, Jews in Florida were persecuted. Part of the persecution was religious. Part of the persecution was because Jewish businesses sometimes hired African Americans when other white-owned businesses wouldn’t. Sometimes the persecution took the form of exclusion from clubs and activities. Sometimes the persecution was more overt.
Sometimes other groups have endured mudslinging and attacks on their faiths and traditions. We didn’t say you’d find paradise in the Tampa Bay area. Nevertheless, for the most part, we have learned to live together and to respect each other’s differing beliefs.