Bayport Park in Hernando County, Florida

Photograph: Bayport Park SWFMD.jpg by DanTD · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Hernando County attraction

Bayport Park

Hernando County · Gulf Coast

A cotton port in the 1850s that ran the Union blockade through the Civil War, now a park of 45 residents and a fishing pier.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Bayport grew up in the early 1850s at the mouth of the Weeki Wachee River as a supply and cotton port, and for a short time it was the seat of Hernando County, until that moved to Brooksville in 1856. The Civil War made it briefly important. Union warships blockaded the Florida coast, and when the large ports were shut the small rivers like this one became the way goods still moved. The Union Navy caught eleven blockade runners near here between 1862 and 1865, and there were regular skirmishes on this shore. The site of the Confederate cannon battery can still be made out on the wooded point just north of the fishing pier. After the war Bayport was the main export point in the county for lumber and farm goods, until the railroad reached Brooksville in 1885 and the traffic went inland instead. The place never recovered; the 2020 census counted 45 residents. Hernando County and the Southwest Florida Water Management District rebuilt the marina and park in 2008, and what is there now is a boat ramp, a pier and a quiet piece of Gulf shoreline with a great deal of history under it

GETTING THERE

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