Florida Historical Markers Programs - Marker Detail

Description: In 1783, while updating Gulf Coast navigational charts, Jose Antonio de Evia (b.1740), a Spanish naval officer, visited a Spanish fishing camp located on this site. He called it “Rancho de Juaquin.” Artifacts from the 18th and early 19th centuries, now in the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum in St. Pete Beach, indicate fishermen used this camp and its water well until the 1840s. In 1918, when digging the house foundation at 612 Pass-a-Grille Way, a complete Spanish olive jar was discovered. It was donated to the St. Petersburg Museum of History in 1951, but was authenticated as being from this site in 1999. Zephaniah Phillips (1837-1903) was a Union Army veteran who with his family became the barrier islands’ first permanent settlers when they homesteaded here in 1886. The Phillips’ home built that year was moved from 612 to 608 Pass-a-Grille Way in 1918. It was Pass-a-Grille’s first home and one of the first built on Pinellas’s Gulf Beaches.