TARPON SPRINGS

city, Pinellas county, west-central Florida, U.S., on the Anclote River bayous between Lake Tarpon and the Gulf of Mexico, 27 miles (43 km) northwest of Tampa. Founded in 1882 by Anson P.K. Safford, a former governor of the Arizona Territory, it was named for the abundance of tarpon, a large, silvery game fish found in nearby ocean waters. In 1890 John K. Cheney, an early settler, founded the natural sponge industry in Tarpon Springs, which became one of the world's largest; a blight, however, in the sponge beds in the 1940s and the production of synthetic sponges considerably reduced the fleet, which in its heyday comprised more than 200 boats. The city's Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd contains paintings by the American landscape painter George Inness, Jr. Noell's Ark Chimpanzee Farm is nearby. Inc. city, 1887. Pop. (1990) 17,906.