Port Richey

Port Richey began in 1883, when Aaron McLaughlin Richey arrived from Missouri and settled near the mouth of the Pithlachascotee River — the "Cotee" to locals — buying land from the pioneer Clark family at what became Richey Point. He opened a post office in his home in 1884, and a one-room school was organized the following year with Richey among its first trustees. The name is actually older than its better-known neighbor: New Port Richey's post office didn't arrive until 1915, when a planned town grew up a couple of miles upriver. Port Richey incorporated as its own municipality in 1925, partly in response to New Port Richey incorporating the year before, and the two have remained separate cities ever since.

For decades Port Richey stayed a small fishing settlement at the river mouth. The transformation came with the post-war retirement boom: from the 1960s through the 1980s, developers platted vast tracts of affordable single-story block homes across the US 19 corridor — Embassy Hills, Regency Park, Jasmine Lakes, and the 55+ community of Timber Oaks among them. Most of that growth happened outside the small city limits, which is why the "Port Richey" mailing address today covers a far larger unincorporated area than the roughly two-square-mile city itself. Gulf View Square Mall opened on US 19 in 1980 as the area's regional shopping anchor.

The coastline got a measure of permanent protection when Werner-Boyce Salt Springs State Park was established in the 1990s, preserving roughly 4,000 acres of salt marsh, springs, and mangrove shoreline running north from the city. Today Port Richey is best known for its waterfront restaurant cluster where the Cotee River meets the Gulf, its stilt-house views offshore, and some of the most attainable housing on Tampa Bay's coast.