Largo

Largo grew up at the center of the Pinellas peninsula as a citrus town. Settlers had been farming the area since after the Civil War, and the arrival of rail in the late 1880s gave local growers a way to ship fruit north at scale. The town's name is commonly attributed to Lake Largo, a sizable lake that once sat near the settlement and was later drained as the town grew. John S. Taylor built an early citrus packing house in 1902, and packing houses multiplied from there — Largo earned the nickname "Citrus City" as tons of fruit moved out by rail each season. The town incorporated in 1905 with fewer than 300 residents, and in 1913 it became the first municipality in Pinellas County to adopt a council-manager government.

The citrus era defined Largo for half a century — the population grew roughly 500% between 1910 and 1930 — but hard freezes and postwar suburbanization gradually replaced groves with subdivisions. From the 1950s onward, Largo transformed into the residential heart of mid-Pinellas: block ranch homes, condominiums, and a large stock of 55+ communities, including resident-owned manufactured-home cooperatives that remain a signature of the local market. Aggressive annexation through the late 20th century expanded the city's footprint many times over its original one square mile.

Today Largo is the third-largest city in Pinellas County, with a 2020 Census population over 82,000. It has invested heavily in quality-of-life infrastructure — Largo Central Park on the site of the old downtown, the Central Park Performing Arts Center, and the Highland Recreation Complex — while the county's Pinewood Cultural Park on Largo's west side gathers the Florida Botanical Gardens and Heritage Village into one of the area's best free attractions. Largo is no longer a citrus town, but its central, in-the-middle-of-everything geography is still the thing that defines it.