You may recognize the name Bank of Tampa as the small but mighty homegrown bank with offices on Bayshore, downtown, South Tampa, and elsewhere. That bank is nearing its 50th anniversary — but it’s not the original Bank of Tampa. The first Bank of Tampa was the very first bank in the city (and it bears no relation to the current institution).
It was founded in 1883 by Jacksonville bankers Daniel G. Ambler, John L. Marvin, and John N. C. Stockton as an offshoot of their North Florida bank. Marvin arrived in Tampa that September, rented a small wood-frame building on Washington Street between Franklin and Tampa streets, and returned to Jacksonville.
He came back on Oct. 31 with Thomas C. Taliaferro, the bank’s new cashier, and the two converted the rented building into a bank. The 3.5-ton safe arrived the next week aboard a steamer, and eight mules hauled it from the wharf through the sandy streets. The Bank of Tampa opened a few days later with first-day deposits totaling $5,636 — about $180,000 today.
The timing was right for Tampa’s first bank. Henry B. Plant had announced the extension of his railroad to the city, and the town’s population was rising. By Dec. 1, 1885, Tampa’s population had reached 2,376 — up from the 720 in the 1880 U.S. Census. Nearly 3,000 more residents — mainly immigrants from Cuba and Spain — arrived over the next five years as the cigar industry moved from Key West.
The Bank of Tampa opened a new office on Feb. 13, 1886 — often cited as the first brick building in Tampa — and received its national charter three months later, becoming the First National Bank of Tampa.
First National grew with the city, remaining Tampa’s leading financial institution for decades. By the 1970s, it became First Florida Bank and moved into Tampa’s first “skyscraper,” now Park Tower. The bank later merged with Barnett Bank, then NationsBank, and eventually became part of Bank of America.
These mergers reflected the 1980s and ’90s banking trend when most local banks were absorbed by larger institutions. Interestingly, that’s also where the story of today’s Bank of Tampa begins — but that’s for another day.
Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born author, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, where he has worked since 1995.
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