Lutz

Lutz grew up around lakes and railroads. Settlers were farming near the area's lakes by the mid-1800s, and the late 1880s brought the Orange Belt Railway along with timber, turpentine, and citrus operations. The name arrived with the Tampa Northern Railroad: William P. Lutz, a railroad man and sawmill owner, helped get a depot built around 1907-1909, and the stop became known as Lutz Junction. When the post office was established in 1912, the Post Office Department insisted on the name Lutz — rejecting "North Tampa," the name preferred by the Chicago-based North Tampa Land Company, which had bought roughly 32,000 acres around the depot for development.

For most of the twentieth century Lutz stayed what it had always been: a rural lake community of citrus groves, fish camps, and homesteads strung between dozens of named lakes north of Tampa. That changed in the 1980s, when Tampa's growth — and the gravitational pull of employers like the University of South Florida — began converting sections of Lutz into bedroom communities. The transformation accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s with golf-anchored development: the guard-gated Cheval community with its country club and the TPC Tampa Bay tournament course, plus family subdivisions like Calusa Trace.

Modern Lutz remains unincorporated, a census-designated place that famously spills across the Hillsborough-Pasco county line, and it has held onto more of its old character than most Tampa suburbs. Steinbrenner High School — named for the Yankees owner and Tampa philanthropist — opened in 2009 and quickly became one of the area's strongest school draws. BayCare's St. Joseph's Hospital-North opened on Van Dyke Road in 2010, and the SR 54 and Dale Mabry corridors filled with retail. Yet the community still throws a long-running Independence Day celebration complete with a tongue-in-cheek election for the honorary "Guv'na" of Lutz — a tradition that says a lot about how the old Lutz sees itself.